Left-wing KGO radio host Bernie Ward has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison for the distribution of child pornography. Most people wouldn’t take issue with this, as virtually all consider such material beyond the pale. But are some of our defenses of adult pornography also indefensible?

Although few have much compassion for the disgraced Bernie Ward, perhaps I ought to provide some information mostly absent from the mainstream media.  While some might imagine he was another Jerry Lee Lewis or Roman Polanski, Ward was more like the Roman Emperor Tiberius, as he descended into truly dark perversion. Writes MercuryNews.com:

The government's court documents alleged that Ward possessed images of sex acts on children as young as three years old, and revealed his online exchanges with the dominatrix in [sic] which he discussed his sexual attraction to children.

‘These images depicted these minors suffering the most horrific torment,’ Steve Grocki, a Justice Department lawyer who led the Ward prosecution, said . . . .  ‘He traded in the currency of human suffering.’

I should point out that in these images, at least some of the children were being abused by full-grown men. And I think this is all that need be said about Ward’s crime, as, even in our libertine times, it’s not necessary to make the case against so obvious an evil.

But this did get me thinking about regular pornography, which has completely saturated our society.  It’s big business, with the Internet bringing it to hundreds of millions of households the world over.  It’s now even viewed by children, many of whom would otherwise not even lay their hands on a girlie magazine, and who, for certain, would usually be afraid to bring such a thing home.

I could write about this and how regular porn may be a gateway perversion, just like some label marijuana a gateway drug. I could discuss how it encourages married men to lust after other women “in their heart” and commit virtual adultery. But many will say, “Yeah, sure, but that’s the price of freedom.”

Is it really the price of freedom – properly understood?

I don’t intend here to make a case for the criminalization of pornography. I certainly have thoughts on the matter, but I’d rather discuss one of the arguments used to advocate its legality: that such expression is protected under our First Amendment.

It isn’t just modern-day Marquis de Sades who thus contend, either, as many basically moral people believe it’s a matter of holding freedom of speech sacrosanct. The thinking is that if we allow the censors to prevail in one area – even this one – what shoe will drop next? Whose speech will next be in the crosshairs? What if I told you that this very attitude threatens legitimate freedom of speech?

When the frivolous is lumped in with the serious, the result is the latter loses credibility. For instance, many lament the tendency to label ambiguous sexual encounters as rape. It’s the work of people who, in just the way some “civil-rights activists” read racism into everything, are so blinded by their own prejudices that a mere allegation of rape constitutes evidence. The fear, however, is that these lesser acts will not be demonized as much as rape will be trivialized.

When the Founding Fathers recognized the right to free speech, they were concerned about the stifling of political, religious and social opinion; thus, it was meant to apply to the written and spoken word. These 18th-century men never intended to protect things such as flag burning or pornographic representations through the amendment. Mind you, this isn’t to say that all of them would have been opposed to burning flags under all circumstances (I suspect opinion varied), only that this wasn’t contemplated as a first-amendment protection. As for porn, any claim the founders even considered such a thing when conceptualizing freedom of speech is preposterous. And I’m quite sure that virtually all of them wouldn’t have taken issue with its criminalization.

Yet, in typical end-justifies-the-means style, the advocates of smut just had to argue for its legalization by conflating it with true speech. It’s not surprising, of course, for what moral argument could they have proffered? Their only recourse was legal, even if it was an inane rationalization.

The result of allowing this camel’s nose in the First Amendment’s tent is that “speech” has become “expression,” and the right has been expanded to perverse proportions. It now covers not only the aforementioned but also the political and social activism and clothing of minors in schools. Thus, just as the category of “heroes” now includes the not-so-heroic (such as sports figures), that of “freedom of speech” includes the not-so-important. Does this increase respect for the right – or diminish it?

It’s much like claiming the Second Amendment protects the right to possess weapons of mass destruction. If this association became assumption, people just might conclude that the right to bear arms wasn’t such a good idea after all. If anyone thinks this isn’t an apt analogy, sorry; equating a nuclear device with “arms” occupies the same neighborhood of nonsense as equating a pornographic image with “speech.”

At the end of the day, the Constitution is silent on pornography’s legal status. Therefore, you can argue for its legality without doing violence to the Constitution – that is, until and unless you do so based on a constitutional argument.

Many today advocate enactment of hate-speech laws of the kind they have in other parts of the West. If this were ever visited on us, it would be an abomination, an example of a lack of respect for the First Amendment. Then maybe we would ponder how an earlier lack of respect for freedom of speech, one that offered its protections to an abomination, helped corrupt a most cherished right.

Selwyn Duke is a columnist and public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh Show, at WorldNetDaily.com, in American Conservative magazine, is a contributor to AmericanThinker.com and appears regularly as a guest on the award-winning, nationally-syndicated Michael Savage Show. Visit his Website.