While I do wholeheartedly agree that promoting fetitization of marginalized people who are vulnerable is despicable, evil, and just about any other pejorative you can think of, it’s a thought crime.
It’s not illegal to create digital art (even the disgusting kind) which depicts fictitious grown adults doing grown adult things.
I would argue that if any such subclass of degenerate exists they already exist. You’re not creating this subclass and any claim of expansion of such a subclass would be anecdotal at best and bullshit at worst. If they’re out there they’re out there. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Which came first, the pornography or the degenerate?
We have a constitutionally protected right in this country to freedom of expression and that right cannot be infringed simply because you believe that it could lead to more people being taken advantage of. The right to that expression must be protected regardless of repugnant you believe the resultant actions are. As history is shown any number of times the restriction of any right is a slippery slope in any capacity.
As a society we need to strongly condemn these actions, and we need to ensure that the most vulnerable among us are absolutely protected. But as soon as you start making thought crimes illegal you open the door to any number of machinations. How long before the extreme right use that precedent to start prosecuting individuals for other thought crimes? I would bet my last dollar it wouldn’t take very long…
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I’m going to take your comment at face value and go with the charitable interpretation that you have sincere beliefs and are sharing them, but I’m also going to explain why doing so is difficult for me and hopefully addressing your points.
True, but someone with a developmental disability in which they remain very much a child for their whole life is clearly a different thing. I am fairly sure that in the US at least, creating digital art of children being involved in sexual situations is illegal, and as such, I believe by extension that since a developmentally disabled person cannot be considered a “grown adult” that arguably the same should be true for them.
And I would argue otherwise. There are many, many ideas that I was exposed to throughout my life that had never entered my mental lexicon until the idea was presented to me. Nobody can know everything, and so I don’t actually think this is a chicken and egg problem at all. When someone previously has no idea such a thing even exits, and then is presented with such an idea, definitively, one of those things came first.
Not everyone lives in the USA. Secondly, that “constitutionally protected right” has literally been hijacked by “free speech warriors” to infiltrate our government with explicit intent to control speech. That’s literally happening right now. Elon Musk is a particularly egregious example of someone deeply hypocritical about this subject, who claims he is a “free speech extremist” and claims that he would never ban any type of speech on his social media… yet does exactly that, literally constantly. I don’t feel the need to show as much here because it’s well documented elsewhere. He also is literally one of the people infiltrating our government and using keyword filters to delete US history from government websites, so extremely that we lost evidence of the Enola Gay and the Navajo Code Talkers. So while in charge of Xitter, it can be argued he isn’t an arm of the government and not restricting free speech on his own website (it can still be argued that his stances don’t match his actions) in his position at DOGE, he is literally an arm of the government screeching about “free speech” while simultaneously banning ideas he doesn’t like.
Once again in regards to not everyone living in the USA, Europe has many different countries which have very strict speech laws, and none of those countries are facing the same loss of human rights and access to historical information that the US is under a so-called free speech supporting government administration. Germany has long has strict rules against Nazi imagery and Nazi speech since the end of World War II and I would not consider Germany to be slipping into fascism because of it. It’s arguably something that has held the tide of fascism at bay by refusing to let people try to rewrite history, as Musk regularly uses his free speech to do in regards to World War II, like claiming that Hitler didn’t kill anybody, he only ordered others to kill people, and so it’s really the evil bureaucrats who followed his orders who were at fault. The man who gave the orders and the bureaucrats are all at fault, in reality. Free speech advocates often hide behind it to split hairs and attempt to repaint history in vile ways and I don’t personally think having laws that prevent things like, say, holocaust denial, are bad in and of themselves.
The extreme right are happily using free speech as a shield to do that literally right now and we are literally in a constitutional crisis because of it. Wake up.
Xanza@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Thinking and behaving like a child because of a developmental disability is the not same as being a child. Even if a person has the mentality of a child they’re still an adult. They have adult rights, and adult responsibilities. The mentally infirm deserve more protections under the law (and they get them) than the average person, but you can’t charge people who crime against those who have developmental disabilities as if they crimed against children. That’s pure and unadulterated insanity and denies reality.
You seem to be stuck in the idea that those who think like children should be protected like children. And I don’t necessarily disagree with that at face value. But it’s more nuanced than you’re giving it credit for and not something you can do in our legal system because even criminals have rights, and deserve to be charged with crimes appropriate to their crime–as fucked up as that sounds, its how our legal system works. Attempting rape is not the same crime as rape. Even if said criminal had every intention to actually rape, if they didn’t actually rape then you can’t charge them with rape.
In the same fashion, you can’t charge a person who sexually assaults a person with a disability with child based sex crime simply because the person who was assaulted has the mind of a child. That’s not appropriate and infringes the rights of the criminal. We already have separate laws which address the disparity in the mentally ill’s inability to protect themselves within our laws–and these laws are very important. A sex crime against a woman, and a developmentally challenged woman are already two different crimes, the latter of which can be significantly worse because of the victims inability to protect themselves.
They’re trying. Yes. But we still have the constitution. They can try all they want, that doesn’t mean they’ll be successful. They’ve been trying for decades and decades to make being gay illegal, and they haven’t gotten anywhere with it. None of this is new. The issue would be giving them precedence to go off of. If they have that, they can make the case that you actually can make being gay illegal–and you’re going to want to avoid that at all costs.
3dogsinatrenchcoat@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Adults with down syndrome are not “mentally children”. Some people with down syndrome are able to live and function independently, and even among those who don’t, they are disabled adults with higher support needs, not children. Being disabled doesn’t stop time from passing, disabled people still fucking age.
and you know what else? People with down syndrome are perfectly capable of having consensual sex. Because they’re grown fucking adults who can think for themselves. To declare them children does them a disservice and robs them of their autonomy