It was inevitable.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia – in American Library Association, Inc., [and] Multnomah County Public Library vs. United States of America – stepped promptly into the generous boardwalk carved out by the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to legalize "soft" child pornography (i.e., "virtual" children).
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On May 31, 2002, the Appeals Court legalized the "right" of library patrons to assault children and other non-consenting folks by viewing, and then leaving on the computer screen, pathological acts of bestiality and sexual torture of adults and children – paid for with our tax dollars.
Well, it's not a perfect world.
These "rational" judicial verdicts treat as legitimate "speech" images that create, in viewers young as well as old, physical changes in the brain and that imbed irrational states of intense sexual and fear arousal. Children and illiterate alike rapidly decode sexual pictures. As BBC art expert John Berger says in "The Art of Seeing," (1977): "The child looks and recognizes before it can speak … seeing comes before words."
News flash: Speech is the written or spoken word, it is not pictures.
Based on what brain researchers call the "law of strength," we know that the brain's right hemisphere of image processing, feeling and excitation dominates the left hemisphere's efforts to decode text and then to engage in rational thinking.
Pornography-as-speech judges fail to recognize that erotically or sadosexually assaulted children cannot give informed consent to images that, on the evidence, cause brain-mind-memory restructuring – changes that can last for years.
The following comments by UCLA psychologist Dr. Margaret Kemeny to commentator Bill Moyers on "Mind & Body," a PBS-BBC 1993 series special, are wholly applicable to pornographic exposures at school, at home and elsewhere:
Although it seems intangible, anytime we feel anything, anytime we think anything, anytime we imagine anything, there is activity in the brain that is taking place in the body at that time. That activity can then lead to a cascade of changes in the body that have an impact on health … on the immune system.
Yes, even liberal Mr. Moyers reports that what we see changes our immune system, saying in the 1984 Annenberg/CPB, WNET/New York series, "The Brain: Learning & Memory:" "For thousands of years it has been said that our thoughts and feelings can make us sick or well … States of mind like sadness may have a counterpart hidden within the brain."
Because sexually explicit stimuli overwhelm the left hemisphere, rational thought and reason, these false images violate true informed consent and they are harmful to vulnerable adults and to minors.
The physiological reality, discussed in a later article, is that viewing pornography commonly triggers internal, endogenous drug production. The exposure – on computers or elsewhere – of adults, and especially children, to split-second "teaser" images incites an endogenous drug "high." Neurologist Gary Lynch explains to Moyers in the 1984 PBS "Brain" series:
What we're saying here is that … an event which lasts half a second within five to 10 minutes has produced a structural change that is in some ways as profound as the structural changes one sees in [brain] damage.
Even pornography advocates freely admit that these stimuli create emotional excitation (experienced as a state of lust overlapped with fear, shame and confusion).
Consider all of this in light of a report in Science (Feb. 16, 1996) titled "New Clues to Brain Dopamine" that "too much neuronal activity can be as bad as too little."
Writing in "Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don't Think," (1990) educational psychologist Jane Haley demonstrates the obvious, that the human brain "is plastic." Especially when we are young, "large areas of uncommitted brain tissue can be molded ... to the demands of a particular environment."
So pornography molds some brain environments. In a classic 1979 work, "Consciousness: Brain, States of Awareness and Mysticism," neurologist Paul MacLean observed that humans believe what their eyes see. The physical brain does not distrust pornography:
When nature … failed to provide [man with] a radar antenna and viewing screen … a mere phantom is sometimes sufficient to trigger the entire copulatory act [in animals].
Pornographic addiction is better understood if, as brain expert Richard Restak states in his 1988 work "The Mind," "inhibition rather than excitation is the hallmark of the healthy brain."
This list of health-based neurological observations about the instinctual brain-imprinted response to pornographic sights and sounds indicates that viewing pornography is a biologically significant event that overrides informed consent – and that is harmful to children's "plastic" brains because it compromises their grasp of reality and thus their mental and physical health, their well-being and their pursuit of happiness.
These physiological facts prove – except to pornography-friendly judges – that the sexual excitation of children, whether direct or mediated, certainly is contra-indicated.
Pornography might be as harmful to minors as our court system has become.
Editor's note: The upcoming July edition of WorldNetDaily's popular Whistleblower magazine will be titled, "GAY RIGHTS' SECRET AGENDA: How and why the homosexual activist movement has targeted America's children." Subscribe to Whistleblower at WND's online store, ShopNetDaily.