Child pornography vs. murder

published Jan 17, 2007, last modified Jun 26, 2013

A long lost documentary called The Lolita problem says this:

Also last year, a Texas man was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison for processing $1.4 million's worth of online child porn subscriptions in a single month.

And they say it like it's a good thing.

Forgive me for not attacking the child abusers for a second, but do you honestly think it's fair that a murderer gets 25 years in jail, and a simple middleman of child porn (no, not a photographer, not an owner) gets 1,335 years?

Excuse me, but I might have missed the memo: did we change our minds about the fact that killing a person is the most irreparable transgression of all? Or did "child fans" suddenly develop an MRI machine that peeked inside the heads of both a child used for porn and a dead guy, then objectively assessed that the child suffered the most irreparable damage?

I didn't think so.

Wasn't the criminal justice system about fair and proportional punishment? Isn't prison one of the "ways to reform a crooked individual"? How, then, is a 1,335 year sentence going to be balanced or reforming? Jeez, frankly, we'd be better off if we just admitted we hate the porn guy's guts, and shot him in the head -- at least that'd be honest.

I'm all for stopping abusers, but I'm definitely all against these deleterious moral fashions (especially of the "hey, look, there's a teen in a swimsuit, that guy's a pedo, let's fry him at the stake"). Today's fashionable punishment standards are nothing more than 10x revenge in politically correct disguise.