Our child porn shame goes international

It started off as one of the most asinine causal correlational mixups in the last year. The suspect in the Holly Jone's murder trial "admitted" that he viewed some child porn before committing his crime.

Michael Briere was a software programmer with no criminal record when he watched child pornography one drizzly evening in May 2003 - and within minutes, he'd snatched a 10-year-old girl from the street and then sexually assaulted, strangled and dismembered her

Beyond the obvious attempt to deflect blame for his actions (it wasn't me, it was the evil porn), that is like blaming the Columbine murders on bowling. Completely ridiculous.

Of course, we have all heard this type of stupidity before. Video games get blamed for school violence, violent movies get blamed for serial murders. MTV gets blamed for sexualized teenagers, and sex education gets blamed for teenage pregnancies. All of the above seem reasonable... to some people, but none of them have any data to back it up. In this case, the sample size is one, which of course makes it statistically irrelevant.

What makes this case worse? Our bickering politicians of course. The Conservatives decided to exploit this to accuse Martin of being soft on child porn. In a press release entitled "Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography?", they decided to go for the attack ads that the Liberals have favoured so much in the last few weeks.

"Paul Martin's record on child pornography is shameful and just another reason why his government must be defeated on June 28," Harper declared.

So, is Paul Martin really in favour of child pornography? It seems like a silly position for a politician to take. Of course, what Harper is really referring to is Bill C-12, the latest infringement on free speech. Formerly known as Bill C-20, it would abolish the "artistic merit" defense and replace it with "public good". Artist and writers would have to show that their works were made in the interest of public good to avoid censorship.

Frankly, I'm not even sure if Martin is opposed to C-12... but he should be. Our free speech laws are already fairly tenuous, the last thing we need is even further restrictions. Either way though, support for the artistic merit defense is hardly support for child pornography.

Now, as a final bonus to Canada CNN has picked up on the story. The world vision of Canada will soon be that of Mad Cow, overreaction to SARS, and politicians bickering about child porn. Great.