I assume everybody's heard about the ruckus going on with LJ deleting a whole bunch of journals and communities which might have been supportive of pedophilia. I've been thinking about this for about a day now, and I think my opinion has matured a bit. This is probably going to be controversial.

I think LiveJournal screwed up, big time. Their mistake was in deciding to monitor content to any extent not required of them by law. Not only should they not have deleted fannish communities and survivors communities, they shouldn't have deleted anything which isn't actively used to solicit sex with children. And those only to protect themselves from legal action.

See, I think pedophiles should get LJs, too. If somebody wants to come on here and post about how they get turned on by children, I don't think LJ should stop them. Maybe they want to angst about how their feelings are in conflict with the expectations of society. Maybe they want to talk about how they're coming to accept themselves as who they are. Hell, maybe they even want to say there's nothing wrong with what they desire and that society is wrong to damn them for it. I think an LJ where people don't have to fear banning for expressing distasteful opinions is a better LJ.

This is about free speech. Not in an "I'm an American and I have a right to Free Speech, dammit!" way. Six-Apart is a business, and they can make as restrictive rules as they please in this community, and our recourse is to vote with our feet and our wallets with respect to those choices. But the thing which makes this community beautiful is that people can and do talk about whatever's on their minds. If we make topics off limits, that starts to disappear. People become afraid to post, because their account might get deleted. This tool for speedy communication with complete strangers all around the world becomes compromised.

Now, granted, the person who posts to their public LJ that they fantasize about having sex with children can fully expect to be at the center of a raging shitstorm of protest. That's to be expected, that's the community reacting within the means of the community. Hell, there'll probably be a flood of requests to get them banned, too. But the powers that be shouldn't cave in to those complaints. A place where distasteful speech isn't silenced, and the community is allowed to hear it and respond, is a better place.

I'm going to spare you all the Free Speech rhetoric. I don't have anything new to say on that front. I'm just saying that if we hold this ideal of Free Speech, then it includes the pedophiles along with the Nazis and the gay-bashers. They get to say their piece too; use it to identify potential criminals, bust them if they go from speech to action, but don't silence them.

ETA: Ok, it's not just about Free Speech. It's also about people wh o aren't thinking. Some people don't seem to realize that there's a difference between writing fiction about sex with children, writing about one's experiences in the past having had sex with children, writing about one's fantasies about having sex with children, writing about having had sex with a child yesterday, writing about one's plans to have sex with children, and actually having sex with children. Speech is, itself, an action, but it's not the action it describes. Sometimes that action is problematic too (as writing to solicit sex with minors).