Ernestly ?!Ernestly ?!By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
Just when you have may have come to the conclusion that I have no thoughts on anything more current than the Great Depression of Saskatchewan, here I am geared to surprise you.
And this isn't about Bill Clinton, on whom I may have no further comment until the Senate trial ends - if then. The Olympics scandal? Who is surprised? Give people access to power, money, sex, privilege, or any combination of the foregoing, and the table is set. They don't even wait for grace. Throw in representatives of governments so corrupt that they make the Devine Group of Saskatchewan infamy look like an ad for Oxydol, and by then it's too late to close the barn door. (Someone peeking over my shoulder just told me they don't make Oxydol anymore. So make it Tide. Next thing someone will tell me Aunt Susie no longer makes laundry soap by cutting thin flakes from bars of P&G soap.)
So what I am on about today is this: the recent decision by a British Columbia Supreme Court judge that possession of child pornography should not be a crime because to do so contravenes the charter of rights providing guarantees of thought, belief, opinion and expression.
Come to think of it, wasn't it a B.C. judge who, a few years ago, dismissed child molestation charges against an adult male because the victim - a girl of about three years of age - had displayed sexually aggressive conduct? But let us not blame B.C. Some of my best friends live there. Even relatives. Even thousands of perfectly respectable ex-Saskatchewan people. In any case, British Columbia folks are as vocally outraged as anyone over the decision.
But to return to the facts:
The individual who had been charged and successfully defended himself, is one John Sharpe, 65, described as a retired city planner, and a writer. According to Maclean's Magazine, he referred to his affinity - if that is the proper term for possession of material conceded to be child pornography - as "intergenerational sex."
Justice Duncan Shaw wrote that "there is no evidence that the production of child pornography will be significantly reduced if simple possession is made a crime." Also, that a person's belongings are "an expression of that person's essential self."
In fairness to the judge, however flawed we may consider his opinion - and we do not need legal training to hold an opinion - he is simply focusing on a person's private thoughts and activities involving only that person. He is neither insisting nor implying, for instance, that churches ought to ordain John Sharpe as a minister or put him in charge of a Sunday School class. Or that we ask him in for tea. However, even conceding that the ruling, as it is grounded, is not totally absurd if applied only to possession of ordinary porn, it stretches things more than a bit to apply it to child porn.
It might be argued, for instance, that however revolting and obscene pornographic material displaying adults may be, there is some likelihood that activities therein exhibited were performed by or participated in by consenting adults, and the reproduction of the material for distribution likewise consensual.
The same cannot be said of child porn. Children lack the legal and moral maturity, and - even more important - the independence to consent or decline to take part in, or being depicted in connection with unacceptable acts, or shown in attire or lack of attire that might be considering to be pandering to the prurient interest. From that presumption, I believe it is only a small step to presume complicity on the part of individuals possessing such material with those orchestrating, portraying or distributing it.
It is not as far removed as it may appear at first blush from the old principle in criminal law (as I understand it) that the use of poison in homicide presupposes intent. One does not carry poison for self-defense or for innocent competitive games. Likewise, as I have already suggested, anyone wilfully obtaining or possessing child pornography instantly becomes an accessory after the fact in a criminal act - an act essential to creating and distributing it.
Most Canadians would probably agree that if the law - or the charter accepted as law - supports John Sharpe, then it is wrong.
A leading daily newspaper asks if kiddie porn is the type of "hard case" said to make for bad law. "Or do we have something else - low people hitching themselves to high principle and, like it or not, bumping the rest of us along for the ride?"
A British Columbia author of a Letter to the Editor of the same newspaper, after expressing at length his revulsion for relaxation of his province's laws respecting children and sex even prior to the Sharpe decision, writes that "it's time for the people to utilize the sanction offered to them by the U.N. under principle 02 of the Rights of the Child, which reads in part: 'the child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and other means.'"
We probably have not heard the last of this case. I hope not.
My address (also listed on the Review's Website) is ernestly@pathcom.com.
Box 400, 904 East Avenue
Weyburn, SK
S4H 2K4
Phone: (306) 842-7487
Fax: (306) 842-0282
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Review (1987) Ltd.
