The UK Story I’m REALLY Interested in Today? Porn Bans, not Babies

I get it. A princess had a baby. Great. I’m glad mother and baby are fine, but I just don’t care beyond that. Why a royal baby matters these days is beyond me, but if you want to go buy a commemorative cup or something to remember the occasion, go you.

However, I’ve been following another story since I heard about it yesterday: the UK looks poised to restrict pornography across the country.

Good on you, UK. To me, this is something that’s been a long time coming.

Society today has sort of looked at the online cesspool that is internet pornography and just shrugged its shoulders. It’s there, it’s everywhere, so why bother fighting it? And I understand the logic behind that. It truly is a complex international problem. And yet arguing “It’s hard” isn’t a good enough reason to just not do anything about it.

When did the right to pornography become sacrosanct?

I understand that it’s a free speech issue. One man’s porn is another man’s art (arguably), and having the government get involved in what can and can’t be shown to the public at large is a murky area with some big potential pitfalls. But it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. There can be filtered access to the internet, and then ways for adults to get through those filters if they so choose.

I also understand that those filters aren’t 100% accurate. Smut will still get through, and innocent material will be filtered by accident. It’s a constantly evolving process of refining the filter. But to argue that “it can’t be done perfectly, so it shouldn’t be done at all” is just plain weak, in my opinion. We have laws against children drinking alcohol. Do the laws work 100% of the time? No. So does that mean we just give up and don’t try to have those laws at all? Of course not.

Will such a ban make parents less strict on monitoring internet access of their children? For some parents, sure. But here’s the thing, people–right now, a ton of parents don’t monitor at all. I can almost guarantee it’ll be a net gain of monitoring and filtering for children, and that’s a big plus in my book.

Will children get around the ban? I’m sure they’ll be able to. It’ll likely take all of a day or two for ways of circumventing the ban to be spread online. But again, that only works if the kid is dedicated and set on finding porn online. In which case, no ban would work at all. But there are plenty of children who aren’t intent on finding porn who stumble across it by accident. A law and ban like this will help those children immensely.

I get that my views may be old fashioned. But I believe society should do what it can to protect children from harmful influences until the children are old enough to decide for themselves if they want those things in their lives or not. We don’t have free cigarette dispensers littered across the country, or open bars in elementary schools. And yet we have free unfiltered internet access across the country, and we think nothing of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to ban the internet. I don’t want to put a muzzle on it. But the default setting doesn’t need to be set to FULL PORN. Google image search, for examples, defaults to a filter. People can turn the filter off if they so choose. But it should be a conscious choice.

I hope the UK’s experiment is successful, and that the approach is adopted by other countries, as well.