I always feel a bit stupid linking to Neil Gaiman’s Journal because I’m pretty sure that everyone who reads my blog reads his as well, but today he has a very good entry and some of you may have skipped over it so I wanted to highlight it.

Neil is asked why the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is supporting Christopher Handley, despite the fact that Handley’s manga collection contained some material that could be viewed as child porn (albeit in comic form, not actual children). Neil addresses the issue about freedom to publish “obscene” material very well, but I wanted to add a couple of points. Firstly there is this comment from the email Neil is responding to:

haven’t there been lots of credible psych studies saying that if you find a support community for a fetish, belief or behavior, you’re more likely to indulge in it?

This, of course, is exactly the argument that has deployed against gay clubs, or feminist clubs, or any other type of behavior that someone in authority (or who wants to be in authority) chooses to dislike. “If you allow the queers/women/whatever to organize then they will encourage each other in their filthy habits.”

And secondly there is the “if we can just save one X [vulnerable person] from Y [awful fate] then surely we must Z [take away lots of liberties from everyone, though of course we won’t put it like that].” Well, no. It might be fashionable in the blogosphere, but the argument that one individual’s rights trumps the rights of everyone else in society if that individual can present a heart-rending enough sob story is no way to run a society.

Managing large groups of humans, which is what running society is all about, is a complex balancing act of competing desires and needs. Obviously we want to make sure that people, especially vulnerable people like children, are not discriminated against or abused. But that doesn’t mean that protecting those people should involve discriminating against or abusing others. So no, we should not feel sorry for fundie groups when they complain that their right to hate anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their faith has been infringed. And we should not feel sorry for Libertarians who complain about the loss of their right to own slaves.

And we should not give people in authority the right to arbitrarily ban works of art, and prosecute those who produce and read them, because a few disturbed people might read or see them. If there is actual harm being done (e.g. real children being forced to act in porn) that’s a different matter, but giving judges or policemen wide powers to ban anything that they happen to think is obscene is not a healthy thing to do.