© Sauce*Box, Spring 1996.
All rights revert to author.
In Search of Indecency
by T.L. Kelly
I'm sure I'm not the only one that is curious about what constitutes "indecency" on the 'Net now that we have the handy-dandy Communications Decency Act to show us the way. I probably wouldn't have gone searching for indecency on the Web had the U.S. Congress not enlightened me to the rampant perverse sex predators putting up sites willy-nilly, or so they claim. And so, I went for a browse recently looking for sites that would disgust me, frighten me, or at least shock me and make me write bad checks. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when the sites that disgusted me most had nothing to do with perverted sex or graphically enhanced naked people at all.
For instance, on the page for The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project I discovered that the current grand total of annual nuclear weapons spending is $33,248,300,000. I nearly puked after reading the 50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons, which includes a myriad of indecencies such as the currency stored until 1988 by the U.S. Federal Reserve, with which politicians will buy stuff after a nuclear war. It totals more than $2,000,000,000,000. I find this particularly disgusting and immoral in light of the fact that nearly 23 percent of children in the U.S. are currently living in poverty.
Further in my search, I learned that denying teenagers the right to learn about sex from a variety of sources, and not just from their (mostly) misinformed parents, is an immoral practice that can lead to teenagers engaging in risky -- often deadly -- behaviors. I learned that the majority of parents want their teenagers to not only learn the various factoids about sex (i.e. what goes where, how the sperm gets to the egg, etc.), but also about sexuality and sexual identity. In the testimony of the American Psychological Association submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives on December 6, 1995, entitled Parents, Schools , Values, I learned that "most parents overwhelmingly support school-based sexuality education. According to two recent surveys, between 80 and 90 percent of parents in the U.S. want sexuality education to be taught in schools; ninety percent want AIDS education taught to their children (American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1985; Debra DeMauro, 1990, as cited in Brown , Eisenberg, 1995). The majority of those surveyed want such education programs to begin in elementary school, or at least before the beginning of high school. Moreover, when given the option of excusing their children from sexuality education programs, fewer than five percent of parents do so (Haffner, 1994, as cited in Brown, Eisenberg, 1995)." Note that the emphasis here is on sexuality education, not just the sort of anal-retentive "textbook sex" that baby-boomers learned in school, which led to the proliferation of deliberately ignorant answers to simple honest questions teenagers ask today, such as "Does everybody masturbate or is it just me?"
It took a long time to calm down from the shock of realizing that everybody in my family masturbates and has never once been penalized for it, and has for a long time and are not likely to stop regardless if we never type "masturbation" (oops!) online again. Later, I nearly called the police when I realized the flagrant violations of the CDA in my own neighborhood, not to mention in my daughter's e-mail box, when I learned that under the new indecency definition (i.e. anything considered indecent according to community standards -- whose "community" is your best guess), classic and religious art can now be construed as bad for minors to see. Arrest that librarian! You there, art teacher, up against the wall! However, a librarian whose site I found has already found a loophole in the law that makes it acceptable to send minors material from the art archives of most libraries, though the material itself is, according to the doublespeak of the CDA, indecent. See "Indecent Art: Pornography or Masterpiece?" for graphic gifs and jpgs of mythical shameless hussies, touchy-feely omnipotent gods, and one blatantly exhibitionist nude christ.
My search for indecency led me through a few sites with lots of naked people engaged in various choreographed sexual poses and requests for credit card numbers and what-not. That disgusted me too -- how dare those people request my credit card number when I don't even know them. Call your local politicians and have this immoral invasion of privacy stopped! Wait...a search through The Indecency Page reveals that Congress advises requiring credit card numbers to get into smut sites as a way to keep minors out -- at least those minors living in poverty who can't afford a computer anyway, much less a credit card.
Finally, my search led me to The Electric Frontier Foundation, which is diligently putting together a list of Sites That Can Be Banned under the new law. This site was the most disgusting of all, since it included just about every classic novel I read as a child in school and that contributed to shaping the principles of social justice and freedom of expression that I have today. That the basis of my understanding of just about everything moral and sensible is now considered indecent and bad for my daughter to know until she's 18 and can get a one-way ticket out of the U.S. all on her own, is too much indecency for me to bear. I was just about to stop my search and go kill myself since, according to certain perpetrators of the CDA, I am an infected abcess on the right buttock (oops!) of America (oops again!), when I noticed something that gives me hope. Included in the EFF list of sites that can be banned is The King James Bible. Hey! Maybe something good will come out of this fiasco!
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