Crusaders against child pornography have long claimed that the core issue was not people having sexual fantasies about young people but the emotional and sexual abuse inherent in the creation of erotic photos of children and adolescents. Thus, for example, in a precedent-setting 1982 Supreme Court ruling, the court held that a New York child pornography law did not violate the First Amendment because it banned not the expression of an idea but only the abuse of children that occurred in the process.

These arguments were relegated to history when Congress passed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1995. For the first time, CPPA made it illegal to make, sell, or own pornographic pictures with models who appear to be underage, even if the person in the photo is, in fact, over 18. With CPPA, the crime has become enabling a reader or viewer to get excited because someone can be imagined to be under 18. The possible abuse of any honest-to-God child has become irrelevant.

As a result, the battleground in the great pornography debate has shifted from actual to virtual reality, from porn to pseudoporn, from what is in fact being shown to what can be imagined, morphed, or simulated. Possibilities for the future are limitless. We could easily, for example, expand the definition of Statutory Rape to include having sex with someone while imagining them to be younger than the age of consent, or having sex while they wear clothing or arrange their hair in ways make them look (or even feel) like they are underage.

We could then make it illegal to have sex with someone while imagining what they were like when they were underage, or to have sex while imagining or remembering what we were like when we were underage. From there we could go to prohibiting cocktail waitresses to serve drinks while they look under 18, not serving liquor to anyone whose date could imagine her/him being under 18 while watching him/her get plastered, and even to not letting anyone drive a car when they felt like they were, say, 15.

But all that is in the future. For the present we have the following:

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Last January, a man in Olathe, Kansas, was prosecuted for possession of child pornography. He had cleverly (but illegally, it seems) pasted a photo of a young person's face onto a larger, presumably more sexual, nude picture of an adult woman "with the intent to satisfy his sexual desires." The man was acquitted, but only because the judge could not determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the face in the picture was of a child under 18. Despite his acquittal, the court would not release the man's book of pictures of girls taken from legal catalogs and magazines, nor his diary which chronicled his dreams, including some of young girls.

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David Hilton, 48, who characterizes himself as an anti-pornography crusader, was convicted in Portland, Maine, of possessing a computer image in which an innocent image of a child had been technically altered to make it "indecent." Hilton was initially acquitted on the grounds that the Federal law was unconstitutionally vague, but his acquittal was overturned on appeal. The salient issue, according to First Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Hugh Brownes, was "whether a reasonable unsuspecting viewer would consider [Hilton's altered photograph] to be of an actual individual less than 18."

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The Galveston, Texas City Council has asked its city attorney to draft an ordinance that would prohibit the baring of women's breasts, real or phony (no, they're not talking about silicone implants). The law would make it illegal to wear novelty vests embossed with bare breasts and butts, or tee shirts with photos or drawings of bare breasts or buttocks. City Attorney Barbara Roberts assured the City Council that a similar Fort Worth law had been constitutionally tested and upheld.

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Three boys and a girl in suburban Cleveland, aged 14 to 17, made a videotape of themselves having sex. When the girl's mother heard about the tape, she got police to investigate. The girl initially claimed she had been coerced but, after watching the tape with a child psychologist, Juvenile Judge William Chinnock ruled that she was clearly "enjoying her 15 minutes of fame." Nevertheless, he chided the teenagers for using their bodies as "garbage cans" rather than as "sacred vessels." According to investigators, copies of the tape are now in the hands of hundreds of high school students across the nation.

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The Northeast Regional Child Exploitation Task Force has brought charges against a 14-year-old boy in Tenafly, New Jersey for e-mailing child pornography to an undercover detective. It is not clear whether the detective was pretending to be a teenager as well. A spokesman for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says there are more and more reports of children sharing child pornography on the Net.

(This raises the question of whether it's healthier for the millions of teenagers who are certainly searching for pornography on the Net to focus their sexual fantasies on images of adults, or to masturbate to thoughts and images of kids their own age. If we criminalize erotic pictures of kids under the age of 18, are we unwittingly encouraging teenagers to nurture fantasies involving sex with adults? Perhaps the Child Exploitation Task Force is actually a front group for pedophiles, normalizing the idea of sex with adults to teenagers across the land by denying them access to material that would direct their fantasies toward their peers.)

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Sacramento Bee photographer John Trotter was beaten by as many as 12 people when he attempted to take pictures of children in a playground, despite the fact that he was carrying two press cameras and wearing a Sacramento Bee cap at the time. Trotter suffered memory loss and numbness after he was beaten unconscious. He has been unable to return to work since the 1997 attack.

Terauchi Kenkiuchi Golston, 26, one of Trotter's attackers, was convicted in May of attempted murder in the incident. Golston faces a maximum sentence of 21 years to life. Golston apparently assaulted Trotter when Trotter refused to give him film containing photos of the children. Trotter had initially been confronted by the mother of one of the children who thought he was a pedophile.

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Larry Matthews, a journalist with National Public Radio who once did a story on Internet child pornography for a Washington, D.C., radio station, was convicted of possession of child pornography after he downloaded sexually explicit images of children in conjunction with a follow-up story he was writing. An FBI task force on Internet child pornography had searched Matthews' home and found the pictures on his computer. Matthews had been in touch with an FBI agent on the Internet who was posing as a trader of child pornography.

Matthews believed that he had a right to view the pictures as part of the research for his story, but U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. ruled that even though Matthews was a journalist, he did not have the right to break the law that prohibits possession of child pornography. Since 1982, Federal law has prohibited possession of images of children in sexually explicit situations. Matthews faces a possible sentence of 30 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

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In the age of various "Megan's Law" legislation, the potential for a neighborhood sex offender to pull the rug out from under local property values has real estate agents in a quandary. State-by-state Megan's Laws require that a community be alerted if a child molester, rapist, or other sex offender moves into the area. The laws are named after 7-year-old Megan Kanka who was raped and murdered by a sex offender who had been convicted and later released, and who lived in her neighborhood.

The questions realtors are grappling with is this: Are real estate agents required to disclose the presence of nearby sex offenders to prospective home buyers, as they would any other facts potentially detrimental to a property's value? Are they required to research the question by looking through publicly available lists and data bases? Are they required to notify potential buyers of how they can check out the sex offender question for themselves?

From a business standpoint, a realtor has every reason to keep mum on the subject, or at least to remain as ignorant as possible about potential neighborhood sex offenders. "Your resale value goes to hell if a child molester moves in down the block," sighs Frank Cook, publisher of the Real Estate Intelligence Report/Agency Law Quarterly, in a recent Associated Press story. "If you had the choice, why would you move next to that guy?"

Realtors are nervous about being sued by the sellers they represent if they disclose sex offender information and therefore drive buyers away, But they're equally concerned about being sued by buyers if they fail to raise the issue or pass on known information. Most realtors carry what's called "errors and omissions" insurance, but insurers are already hedging about whether suits related to the sex offender issue would be covered by these policies.

There seems to be no truth to the rumor that a nationwide ring of realtors and convicted sex offenders is capitalizing on the issue by buying homes adjacent to sex offender residences at reduced prices, and then selling the homes at substantial profit when the offender obligingly moves to a new location.

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Meanwhile, notoriously uncredentialled antiporn crusader Judith Reisman (who was given millions of dollars in Federal grants under the Reagan administration to count references to children in the cartoons of Playboy, Hustler, and the like) is busy conflating pedophiles and pornographers into a single concept.

A report by Reisman on the recent World Pornography Conference at Northridge University makes six separate references to "pedophiles and pornographers" as if they were one and the same. According to Reisman, "a cadre of admitted pedophiles and pederasts control[s] the field of sexology" through the nation's academic human sexuality programs, including the Kinsey Institute, the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, and the Northridge Center for Sex Research. The Center for Sex Research at California State University/Northridge sponsored the conference.

Claiming a "Mafioso-like relationship" between these institutions and "the underworld of pedophiles and pornographers," Reisman describes the Northridge conference as a summit meeting to "share and shape future national pornography and pedophile strategies." She concludes that, in a world where "an academic institution [is] in bed with pedophiles and pornographers," it's no wonder that judges accept the idea of "adults having legal access to our children for sexual purposes" by "routinely giv[ing] custody of children to known sexual abusing parents."

Perhaps related to Reisman's charges, the Joint Legislative Audit Committee of the California Senate has voted unanimously to order a state investigation of whether "state tax dollars were used to promote child pornography" at the conference. Cal State/Northridge is cooperating with the investigation while standing behind both the Center for Sex Research and the conference. "The university does not fund the [Sex Research] Center," explains university spokesman John Chandler. In any case, he notes, "the 1998 conference was a legitimate academic endeavor. It's a great example of academic freedom."