Impure thoughts

There are some subjects that have been made so taboo even to discuss, that the government has been free to define crime as it pleases and to use any means it can dream up to identify and prosecute people who for instance, abuse children by forcing them into sexual acts. Personally, I have a special kind of hate for people who abuse women and children, but I'm not terribly fond of the kind of crusader who loves fighting this kind of crime so much that they will expand the definition and flaunt not only law, but reason itself to fight it. There are those who argue that criminal intent without action or that conspiring to act upon it is not only a crime, but a crime of thought equally as deserving of all possible punishment as a criminal deed. The difference between a thought crime and a crime become blurred and inconsistent as a religious prohibition and we are not, need I remind us all, a nation where sin is legally equated with crime.

If the State put up a website with a link labeled click here to learn how to steal a car, would you be committing a crime by clicking on it - even if the link was non-functional? Now consider that the link was billed to give you access to child pornography. Now consider that clicking on it allowed the government to have your address; to go to that address and break into your home with guns drawn. Consider that it's being done and that the courts and the law have decided that intent to obtain illegal images is shown by clicking and that an attempt to view is equivalent to viewing and that viewing is equivalent to producing and that producing is abuse of a child.

Is this train of logic soritical? does offering something illegal entail illegal entrapment? Consider too, that you may not have been the one using your computer or indeed your ID and password that day. Consider too that when the swat team bursts through the door unannounced, the accidental shooting of anyone will be charged as murder against you. Consider that ultimately no child has been protected and no abuser of children has been identified much less prosecuted.

Yes, one could consider a random or involuntary click "probable cause" and there are laws equating a mouse click with an attempt to obtain illegal information, but I'm worried that we have cut another swath through laws that were intended to protect the innocent in order to satisfy the zeal of enforcers and the false zeal of politicians eager for one reason or another to appear to be saving the children from harm.

Is it too big a departure to imagine the police putting up a "speed limit 60" sign in a school zone and using it to arrest anyone who believed it? Perhaps it's not a perfect analogy, but perhaps we need to restrain the crusaders or at least constrain them to actions more consistent with justice and with the spirit and letter of our constitution.