Quote:
Originally Posted by otto117
By removing titles that it finds offensive for any reason, Amazon is certainly not censoring. What it is doing, unwittingly, is contributing to a push by a very vocal "moral minority" to purge from the mainstream certain ideas expressed in text form. Because writers actually want to sell their books, writers will likely self-censor going forward in order to stay in the marketplace. More insidiously, the removal of the texts by Amazon helps set the stage for criminal obscenity charges to be filed in the most conservative jurisdictions in the United States (provided the book is still available in printed form).
The last time there was any serious government prosecution of the written word was over 35 years ago. It can happen again. Anyone who has read Phillip Greaves' poorly-written text will know that it's not obscene by a longshot. The two short scenes describing a minor engaged in sex with an adult (from the standpoint of the minor) -- told not for erotic arousal but for the purposes of illustrating Greaves' political point about 'paedophilia' -- is far less explicit than many many books in the marketplace (and still sold by Amazon). If Greaves is convicted, these other books are only a short step away.
On the same basis that Greaves is being attacked, for example, one could attack Piers Anthony's "Firefly," which has a section in the book explicitly describing a sex relationpship between an adult and a 5-year-old girl, told for the purposes of showing that 'paedophilia' isn't synonymous with sex abuse.
Can "Firefly" be prosecuted? Sure it can. So can any title by the Marquis de Sade, or Fanny Hill, for that matter, which contains sexual scenes of minors engaged in sex, including Fanny Hill herself at age 15. (Fanny Hill was last prosecuted in Boston in the 60s and was declared not obscene by the Supreme Court in Memoirs v. Massachusetts -- but under a pre-Miller obscenity standard).
Of course, Amazon is just a business. It is not, like many bookstores over the centuries, part of any intellectual community. What a pity.
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I was mentioning something like this several pages ago - but I think your post says it better and actually uses examples.
Regards
Caleb