THE SUPREME COURT: Virtual Porn, Real Corruption.(decision allowing virtual child pornography)(Brief Article)

The Supreme Court threw out a federal law banning "virtual" child pornography, including both computer-generated images of minors in sexual situations and depictions of minors in sexual situations by adult actors. If the Court had struck down the law because the Constitution reserves the regulation of pornography to states and localities, its decision would perhaps be defensible. But the Court's rationale for its decision was different.

It said that the First Amendment should be presumed to protect pornography that "records no crime and creates no victims by its production." The Court has long held that the amendment applies to states as well as to the federal government (ignoring the fact that it is explicitly directed at "Congress"). So if a state were to ban "virtual" pornography, the federal courts would be obligated under this ruling to block it. The ruling was thus an expansion, not a retrenchment, of federal power.

The Court -- and, it must be added, most of the proponents of the law - - construed the purpose of child-pornography laws too narrowly. The Court comes close to suggesting that virtual child pornography is a good thing, since it reduces the demand for pornography involving actual children: "[F]ew pornographers would risk prosecution for abusing real children if fictional, computerized images would suffice." But the harm done by ...