Public Intelligence Blog

UK Net Porn Censorship Will Also Censor Political Speech – From Day One

Repression:  A proposed pornography-censorship scheme in the United Kingdom is going to censor political speech from day one. There is pressure from the UK Government on UK Internet Service Providers to introduce “default voluntary censorship”, which is supposed to get at “pornography”. This is a covert way of making censorship acceptable and even desirable, “for the children”, but the censorship will cover much more than that.

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We arrive at the important conclusion that censorship is incapable of telling the difference between political contexts and purely pornographic ones. Even if you think the latter is okay to banish from the planet, political discussion is never – never, ever under any circumstance – okay to censor.

The conclusion is inevitable: censorship is not acceptable in any way, shape or form. But those of us who have studied history of power already knew that.

This is an amazing court decision, with enormous implications not only for Catholics, but for religious groups in general. It is hard to believe a court could rule in this way, or that this will not be overturned.

Federal Judge: Catholic Church Has A Constitutional Right Not To Compensate Victims Of Sex Abuse
IAN MILLHISER – Think Progress

A federal judge in Wisconsin handed down an opinion yesterday granting the Catholic Church – and indeed, potentially all religious institutions – such sweeping immunity from federal bankruptcy law that it is not clear that it would permit any plaintiff to successfully sue any church in any court. While the ostensible issue in this case is whether over $50 million in church funds are shielded from a bankruptcy proceeding triggered largely by a flood of clerical sex abuse claims against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Judge Rudolph Randa reads the church’s constitutional and legal right to religious liberty so broadly as to render religious institutions immune from much of the law.