No, not me. I refer instead to Jack McClellan, a blogger in LA who writes about his sexual attraction to children and where he goes to look and photograph them. The NY Times ran
this fascinating-and-disturbing profile of McClellan last week.
An outrage, right? Surely we all agree: He must be stopped, at any cost! But wait -- there's a problem. You see, it's not a crime to lust after children. Nor is it a crime to write about your lust for children. Nor is it even a crime to photograph children in public you lust after (provided you don't do so in a stalking, obsessive fashion).
Acting on your sexual attraction for kids is very much a crime, of course, but as far as anyone knows, McClellan has never done so.
Despite that being so, a court in Los Angeles just issued a restraining order that prohibits McClellan from basically getting anywhere near children again, or writing about children he'd like to have sex with. Over to you,
Prof. Volokh (who first alerted me to this story):
You can't restrict people's movement, and their ability to take photographs in public places (even of children, something that is routinely done by the media and others and that is presumptively protected by the First Amendment), simply because of their ideology and expressed sexual desire, even when one understandably worries that at some point this ideology plus desire will turn into actual molestation. The premise of our legal system is that restraints on where you can go on in public (and broader freedom, including the freedom to photograph and to post photographs) can only be instituted after some showing of concrete evidence that someone has committed or is planning to commit a crime.This is one of those interesting examples that makes think about the normative, behavior-shaping function that "law" serves in liberal society. Virtually everyone agrees that sex with minors is wrong, but punishing the desire to have sex with minors raises problems of a philosophic and pragmatic sort. Jack McClellan is treated as an outcast, a leper -- yet Britney Spears made hundreds of millions of dollars marketing to that same "disgusting" urge that McClellan blogs openly about. He is now being punished for his thoughtcrime in ways that are almost certainly unconstitutional. It will be interesting to see how his appeal plays out (ACLU?)