Porn Free?

I see the right-wing puritans are at it again, attempting to exploit recent horrendous sex-related murders to try and force their anti-porn agenda onto the internet.  Once again we have calls for ISPs to implement web filters for 'adult content' which customers would have to opt out of, thereby branding themselves horrible perverts.  That's undoubtedly how they see it - a prime opportunity to 'out' all those evil porn users.  The fact is, however, that pornography is not, in itself, illegal.  Nor should it be.  For sure, pornography depicting illegal acts, or sexual acts where there is no consent by at least one of the participants, is illegal and should be.  If people want to look at pornography then they have every right to do so.  If parents don't want their children to see online porn then it is surely their responsibility, not their ISP's, or the search engines' responsibility, to ensure that they aren't able to see it, either by implementing filters on their computers or by restricting their children's web access.  Just as it is their responsibility to ensure that their children can't access porn through other media, such as TV or DVDs. 

It never ceases to amaze me, the way in which these right-wingers, who are always condemning the 'nanny state', want to use the state to restrict people's freedom.  Because that's what this is all about.  You notice that they never say they are trying to restrict 'porn',  Oh no, they always use the amorphous term 'adult content', which could include a lot more than pornography - sexual health education, for instance, some brands of satire and political humour, for another, not to mention various political and philosophical discussions and quite a lot of what constitutes 'art'.  AS for their justifications for restricting some types of pornography - that some convicted killers and sex offenders were known to have viewed child porn or so called 'violent porn' (usually consensual S&M sites) - this patently bogus.  Viewing this kind of stuff didn't make them killers and deviants - they were looking at it because they were killers and deviants.  The bottom line here is that I'm not saying porn and the exploitation of women is OK, but the reality is that these attempts to effectively criminalise porn are simply a Trojan horse used by the right to try and further restrict our wider freedoms.