I have decided not to comment on perhaps the obvious choice in the media in regards to Texas this week, arguably more so than the state budget crisis: the frenzy surrounding the open-forum naming suggestions hosted by Austin’s Solid Waste Services, including such pure gold as “the Fred Durst Society of Humanities and Arts”. Too easy. Wouldn’t it be much more fun to dredge up sexual taboos and moral conflicts? I thought so. –M.Y.
Sifting through budgetary minutiae of contemporary Texas Politics, I found an article by Jordan Smith in the Austin Chronicle detailing former Austin Mayor Sen. Kirk Watson’s Senate Bill 407, the “sexting” bill. By now, most Americans should know that “sexting” is the multimedia exchange of sexually explicit content between underage persons—middle and high school students, mostly. This bill seeks to establish new penalties for sexting acts in order to form an intermediate level of penalty between a complete lack of prosecution and prison time/sex offender status. The bill also proposes education programs to curtail the “growing problem” of sexting inTexas
Ostensibly, this bill was designed to lower consequences but raise prosecutions. It is important however to examine the differences between privately shared content among same-age persons and distributed pornography viewed by pedophiles. Obviously, the latter should be prosecuted fully of the law, if not more, but does the former truly necessitate additional funding and resources involved with the programs and their consequences?
Some of Smith’s implied language appears to parallel my own opinion: that the answer to the previous question is a resounding “No”. A longer op-ed piece might even go on to project the complete ineffectiveness of an “educational program” (assemblies were for skipping school to engage in nefarious deeds, remember?), and perhaps propose that the burden of the courts and the “offenders” would be inappropriately high for such a supposedly victimless—for the lack of a better word—crime.
Sifting through budgetary minutiae of contemporary Texas Politics, I found an article by Jordan Smith in the Austin Chronicle detailing former Austin Mayor Sen. Kirk Watson’s Senate Bill 407, the “sexting” bill. By now, most Americans should know that “sexting” is the multimedia exchange of sexually explicit content between underage persons—middle and high school students, mostly. This bill seeks to establish new penalties for sexting acts in order to form an intermediate level of penalty between a complete lack of prosecution and prison time/sex offender status. The bill also proposes education programs to curtail the “growing problem” of sexting in
Ostensibly, this bill was designed to lower consequences but raise prosecutions. It is important however to examine the differences between privately shared content among same-age persons and distributed pornography viewed by pedophiles. Obviously, the latter should be prosecuted fully of the law, if not more, but does the former truly necessitate additional funding and resources involved with the programs and their consequences?
Some of Smith’s implied language appears to parallel my own opinion: that the answer to the previous question is a resounding “No”. A longer op-ed piece might even go on to project the complete ineffectiveness of an “educational program” (assemblies were for skipping school to engage in nefarious deeds, remember?), and perhaps propose that the burden of the courts and the “offenders” would be inappropriately high for such a supposedly victimless—for the lack of a better word—crime.
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