Censorship Concepts and Issues

The concept of censorship is relatively simple: material that is harmful to people in some way should not be allowed to circulate where they can see, hear, or be influenced by it. Material that incites people to commit acts of violence or terrorism should likewise be censored. Information that compromises the national security must be censored. Censorship in its purest form is protection. As protection, censorship is a good thing that a civilized society needs for combating harmful influences as much as it needs firemen to fight fires and law enforcement officers to battle criminals. It is an invisible bubble that prevents undesirable influences from corrupting, terrorizing, or brainwashing innocent people. Yet there are people who are vehemently opposed to censorship.

One might ask how there can be such vast differences of opinion over whether something that is gravely harmful should be censored or not. The controversy in censorship arises because not everyone agrees on what is harmful, what incites violence and terrorism, or what compromises the national security. While many mothers wish to protect their children from pornography, for example, there are many more people who feel their civil rights are being stifled if they cannot view, listen to, and purchase pornography. They do not view pornography as damaging in spite of a multitude of scientific evidence to the contrary and they regard the censorship of pornography as wrong. The unresolved issues in censorshi

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o proliferate but desensitizes people to them. Desensitization, in turn, causes further proliferation. The ubiquity of pornography, for example, has had a numbing effect on the sensitivities that would normally alert people with a sensation of embarrassment when they are stepping over the line; in today's world of porn on every corner, this embarrassment has all but vanished. One of my friends saw a man sitting in a parked car on a busy street in the crowded downtown area of a metropolitan city, "pleasing himself" as my friend puts it in full view of passersby. The man's only concession to privacy was a handkerchief laid over his private parts, which provoked my friend to quip, "As if THAT made any difference!" The handkerchief was a telling symbol, signifying that the man considered himself unseen and cloaked with privacy under it, yet his actions were clear to everyone else. This is one of the primary deceptions of pornography "Nobody knows." Another is "I'm doing nothing wrong." And the most common is, "It doesn't hurt anyone." People who have been seduced and thus deluded by pornography are in no position to make an objective judgment about the harm it causes, so the rest of us have to do it, and law enforcement has

Category: Government - C