Let me see, how should I put this delicately?
It takes a special sort of moral idiot to confuse censorship with common sense. Yet we live in an age where shielding children from sexually explicit content is likened, with straight-faced indignation, to the suppression of free speech. This would be rather like claiming that keeping liquor, cigarettes, and cocaine out of a child’s reach constitutes “starvation.” One wonders how such minds manage to tie their own shoelaces in the morning without mistaking the act for some sort of fascist repression.
Let us begin with the obvious. Censorship — real censorship — pertains to the restriction of information from adults: that is, from those presumed to possess the judgment, autonomy, and moral agency to govern themselves. A ban on political books, a proscription against religious dissent, a prohibition on art: these are matters properly labeled as censorship. They involve the stifling of adult inquiry, adult debate, adult conscience.
Children, by contrast, are not sovereign individuals in the full sense. They are, blessedly, in formation — their judgment untempered, their appetites untrained, their instincts erratic and easily led. To imagine that a child is entitled to the full buffet of adult material — pornography, graphic violence, nihilistic self-harm — in the name of liberty is to adopt the ethics of a wolf regarding a lamb. It is not freedom; it is predation. It is the strong preying upon the weak while congratulating themselves for their high-mindedness.
For goodness’ sake, it’s called “adult” material for a reason, and it’s not because it’s especially appropriate for adults, but definitely inappropriate for children!
Our society already, and uncontroversially, accepts that minors are barred from a host of activities that would be ruinous to them if indulged prematurely. They may not buy cigarettes, or rent cars, or gamble in casinos. They may not drink, drive, enlist in the army, or vote for their supposed betters. Nobody, save a few shrieking cranks, regards this as tyranny. We understand instinctively that a child requires time to grow into the full dignity — and the heavy responsibilities — of freedom.
The sudden exception made for sexually explicit material — that, somehow, this is the one area where children must be “trusted” to exercise discretion — betrays something more sinister than mere inconsistency. It reveals an agenda: the erasure of childhood innocence as an obstacle to adult gratification. It is not, in the end, the rights of the child that such people seek to champion, but their own right to colonize childhood for their own purposes.
And if it now constitutes “censorship” to keep pornography and graphic obscenity out of schools and libraries, then one is left to ask: is it also an act of parental failure to keep such material out of the home? Are responsible mothers and fathers — in their stuffy, outdated way — guilty of “book banning” for refusing to stock the family bookshelf with Penthouse, Hustler, and a few select snuff films for balance? If we are to be truly “liberated,” then why stop at the schoolhouse door? Let the liquor cabinets be thrown open, the heroin syringes passed around, and the backyards turned into cockfighting rings. After all, anything less would be censorship — and we can’t have that.
Such nonsense can only survive by corrupting the very language we use to think clearly about freedom and protection.
This tactic depends, as so much modern cant does, on the deliberate inversion of words. “Freedom” becomes indistinguishable from “license.” “Protection” becomes “oppression.” “Guarding” becomes “censoring.” Orwell had a phrase for this: “the defense of the indefensible.”
We ought not indulge such dishonesties. To protect children is not merely permissible; it is obligatory. To leave them exposed to materials they are unequipped to comprehend, much less withstand, is not liberation — it is abdication. Civilization exists precisely because we acknowledge that there are some things worth shielding, some treasures too precious to cast before the wolves. And childhood, in all its fragile glory, is among the first of these.
Adults may quarrel endlessly about their rights — as is their prerogative — but the idea that we owe nothing special to the young is a sign, not of progress, but of rot. When a society no longer bothers to distinguish between the needs of a child and the wants of an adult, it announces its own exhaustion and decay.
There is no shame, nor should there be, in drawing lines. Indeed, civilization itself is the art of drawing lines — between the sacred and the profane, the innocent and the corrupt, the garden and the desert. To extend adult freedoms to children is not to honor freedom; it is to cheapen it beyond recognition. It is to forget that true liberty demands the cultivation of virtue first — and that virtue, like all good things, must be tended, protected, and taught.
Protecting children from sexually explicit content is not censorship. It is the bare minimum a sane society does to preserve its future. A culture that cannot draw that line has not only lost its mind — it has forfeited its soul.
