🚀 go-pugleaf

kadie@eff.org (Carl M. Kadie) writes:

>pariah@iinet.com.au (Michael Malone) writes:

>[...]
>>I believe that many students at University are under the age of 18 in
>>their first year. The University could very well be indicted for
>>directly providing pornographic materials to these students. Even if
>>a waiver is signed by the parents of these "children", I do not believe
>>that this relieves the Uni from possible prosecution.
>[...]

>Hypothetically, a competent legal advisor might have used this legal
>reasoning to conclude that a university should ban the newsgroups (and
>lots of other material on campus). There is, however, no evidence that
>any competent legal advisors were even consulted. Indeed, given that
>alt.sexual.abuse.recovery was initially banned, it seems more likley
>that action was taken summarily and without meaningful deliberation.

I agree with Carl that the argument above his is not sound. However, even
that misses the point of my original post (not quoted above). I was
concerned in my post, not with the cutting of these groups (although in
fact I am also concerned about that), but rather with the use of _sexual
harrassment_ as the reason! Simply minding your own business looking at
material in a private room somehow becomes _harrassment_! Whether
one should be looking at the pictures or not can legitimately be argued on
other grounds, but I am _scared_ of people who argue it on grounds of
harrassment, because that is such an extreme definition of harrassment
that I greatly fear what other things I might do, such as comment on
politics or religion, for example, that might get swept into the
harrassment bag!

Now I am sure I will be told that the harrassment is in displaying pictures
on a screen in public, but even that I would not call harrassment unless
it was done specifically to target and unnerve specific people. OTOH, it
_would_ be obscenity, which, if it happened, could be brought to book
on the circumstances of the case, without a general ban. It's almost like
banning cars because that's _murder_. (Someone drove a car into a crowded
cafe once.)

IMHO, harrassment involves a deliberate interaction with a specific other
person in an unfair manner. Simply doing something others don't like
cannot be harrassment. If this redefinition of the word as pushed by the PC
crowd is accepted, it is the start of the new dark age.

--

Ron House.             USQ
(house@usq.edu.au)     Toowoomba, Australia.