Censure! What should be censured? Who should do it?

I realize that it is often difficult to intellectualize concepts, rather than emotionally react to them.

I will try to explain what I am suggesting when it comes to finding the real issue in the case where a Colorado writer was arrested on a Florida warrant because of the content of his prose; Phillip Greaves was arrested for selling his book entitled “Pedophiles’ Guide to Love and Pleasure” to a Florida buyer (a law enforcement officer) who specifically requested to buy it.

Tough the behavior might have been acceptable in ancient Greece; the sexual perversion is unacceptable in our society today, a society where pedophilia is defined as a psychiatric disorder.

Let’s first agree that “normal” people are nauseated by the act (of pedophilia). Let’s further agree that to assure the safety of the children, to lesser their exposure to the deviants, and to protect them from this vile perversion, we must expose and discuss the topic rather than hide it or avoid it, contrary to the ways our society dealt with such problems a few years back.

Now, let’s look at the written words. They are used to express people’s thoughts, ideas, research, and views. Sometimes these ideas and views are unbearable to some, but we must let them flow, as once the manipulators are in a position to decide what can and cannot flow; we’ll start sliding on a very dangerous slope.

Let’s go back to Greaves' Book, and let’s imagine for a moment that the title was instead “A journey in the mind of a sick pervert, or how to understand the way pedophiles think, to better hunt them down.” Let’s go further and consider that it is written by a doctoral student with a master in criminal justice, who is presenting his thesis. In his thesis, the author would introduce, with warnings and connotations of disgust, the detailed description of what some pedophiles' fantasies are, for the very specific purpose of understanding the sick functioning of a pervert’s criminal mind, to better investigate their crimes, to set them up, to arrest them, to prosecute them, and ideally, to send them to the electric chair, or to a far away island.

The substance of the text would be exactly the same as is the text in Greaves' book, but for the warnings and the added writer’s opinions reflecting the “normal” societal feelings, and reactions towards the topic. His book containing the exact same content as Greaves', but presented in a different light, would then be completely acceptable, or even praised. Suddenly, in a different frame, the same exact picture loses its lewdness; same exact stories and opposite reaction from the “normal public.”

What if the book was written by one who had been abused for years as a child, and writes it to ask active pedophiles who escape arrest and prosecution, not to hurt their other victims…

The issue here is not with the written words, but with the presentation; not the substance, but the form.

The deadly danger of such censure is twofold: first, who will decide what must be censured? The Ayatollahs, the Nazis, the Chavezs, the Castros, the Klansmans, the McCarthys, the Kim Jong Hills, or the Hitlers? And second, what must be censored?
The only certain way to completely avoid this problem, is to let all ideas flow; these we like, these we dislike, and these we can't stand, in banning any kind of censure.

This case is not about pedophilia. The real issue is that when we accept the government’s censorship of one person’s freedom of expression, sooner or later, we’ll all be suffering similar censorship.