Concerning the legality issue, here's a post I made on Amazon's Kindle boards:
Quote:
Anyone with any knowledge of 1st Amendment law knows that this book is not obscene.
The Miller test (from Miller v. California) exempts obscenity from the protection of the 1st Amendment. But obscenity is basically only hard-core pornography, which this book is not. To be found legally obscene, a work has to meet all three of these tests:
(1) The work must be, taken as a whole, erotically stimulating.
(2) The work must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct.
(3) The work must, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
This book fails the first test because, (based on the descriptions of it I've seen) while it may have a couple of graphic passages, it must be, *taken as a whole*, erotically stimulating. If this book is a "how-to" manual, then it is not, *taken as a whole* erotically stimulating.
I haven't read explicit passages in the book, so I'll assume that they do meet the 2d test.
It doesn't matter whether the material is "harmful to children," whatever that means. Nor is this child pornography, as child porn only applies to pictures, films, videos, etc. featuring actual children. (Ferber v. NY).
The book also fails to meet the third test, as the book was apparently written to make the argument that sex between adults and underaged children should be permitted. I disagree with this argument, but it *is* a serious political argument - the fact that one doesn't like it doesn't make it nonserious or non-political.
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With this in mind, the big question to me is the right of a law enforcement official to extradite and arrest someone for publishing a book that is clearly protected by the 1st Amendment. No matter how immoral people may find the subject matter of the book to be. The power to drag someone across the country and imprison them for something that isn't illegal does, in my mind, justify the Niemoller quote.