PUEBLO, CO – Self-published self-abuser Phillip R. Greaves is going to Disneyland! Do I mean Disney World –because the molestation e-book author is being extradited to Florida? Naw. Thanks to the gung-ho deviant-phobic Florida Polk County Sheriff, the Amazon-banned-infamous, now civil-liberty-abridged, self-scribed child-lover will be jerking off all the way to the bank. Greaves’ The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure is accused of violating obscenity laws and haven’t we been down this road before? Freedom of speech, what’s indecent, Larry Flynt, Nabokov, to name the obvious?
Now I have to tell you, I’d much prefer to defend a literary classic than this Stuart Smalley act for the NAMBLA set, and I wince as I imagine the ACLU inviting more tar-and-feathers as it defends another pedophile, but freedom of expression is absolute. It applies to heretical dissidents as much as to Sarah Palin. Idiots have opinions too, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to them.
Greaves’ DIY rotten-oeuvre probably does not redeem itself with literary merit, I’m guessing, nor do charges mention the book contains contraband photos. Thus the Polk County Sheriff attack may be soiling new ground. The how-to manual is being adjudged indecent based on written accounts of defiling underage fictional characters. Greaves is not under suspicion of having committed the crimes. We can deduce by the lack of charges that no minors were harmed in the making of Phillip Greaves’ fantasies. His “guide book” contains no pictures of exploited children. Greaves is being charged with describing illegal sexual acts which are injurious to minors. So what exactly differentiates this book from other tasteless works of fiction which recount criminal acts, even the most taboo?
There will always be a bible-belt backwater to send out invites for a book-burning. I’m upset I suppose because the Polk County authorities were able to convince Colorado law enforcement in Pueblo to arrest Greaves on their behalf, based on his having shipped a copy of his weirdo book over to their Florida jurisdiction. So it turns our Colorado lawmen are uneducated enough that they went along. At least we could be grateful that evidently they lack the initiative to devise such a sting themselves.
In his zeal to whomp on Phillip Greaves on behalf of the angry mob over at Amazon thirsty for fictional pedophile blood, the Polk County Sheriff bragged he hoped to have the author “eating processed-turkey this Christmas.” As good an admission as any that prison chow is intended to be punishment. This one defines “cruel and unusual” which used to be rationale enough to prohibit state practice, but these days we can’t be bothered to prevent torture.
I shouldn’t minimize the ordeal which Greaves will face with his jailers and fellow inmates, needless to say he’ll be earning every penny of the huge civil liberties settlement to which he is entitled. Maybe in turn he’ll be able to sue Amazon too.
The upshot for the residents of Polk County Florida is that internet merchants will have to be very careful about what they ship to zip codes 33830, 33837, 33841, 33843, 33868, 33898, and 34759. I hope the Polkels get nothing at all in the mail until they recall the grandstanding idiot they have for a sheriff.
But seriously. Are we cheerleading for the prosecution of thought crime? If Greaves had written in the third person, would police be serving a warrant on a page-bound protagonist?
Compared to pedestrian pornography, Phillip Greaves is an amateur. In US sex culture every fetish seems to find its audience. 
Who can deny that the sexualization of American children is pervasive across print and screen? This isn’t about the arbitrary condemnation of the fantasy life of perverts. Subversive classics of literature are often censored based on accusations of obscenity.
Jim Morrison. Snuff said.
Only I think that came from Broward County.
Also a target of such prosecutions is Brave New World. Which merely suggested (ok, strongly suggested) that the Corporate Dictatorship Dr Huxley railed against throughout the book also practiced kiddie sex.
… and had his hero, John the Savage, snuff himself at the end.
There are scenes depicted in the Bible which are much worse, Lot and his daughters for instance, then a few books later the men of a Benjamite city accepting much the same offer as Lot gave the Sodomites. Only it was the dudes concubine, his almost-wife possession. He tosses her to the mob, they rape her to death, he comes out in the morning, suddenly remembers, “Oh, that womanish creature who I own, where is she?” Sees her laying basically out in the patio and tells her “Hey, get up, it’s time to go!”
THEN, when he realizes she was dead (first demands restitution for his property then)cuts her up into pieces and sends them to all the tribes of Israel. A Jew-on-Jew crime (yet another) ensues, the tribe of Benjamin is nearly wiped out.
Then The Judge, in a sudden moment of clarity, realizes “Oops, we done almost wiped out a whole herd of our Hebrew Brethren and Sistren” …who just happened to be descendants of Jacob (Israel) and not only that, his favorite son. The one Rachel died giving birth to him.
To accentuate the point that they had been slaughtering the WOMEN of Benjamin at the same time, and the kids, (you remember the kids, right? The comment involved kids to begin with) somebody twigged to the notion that there were suddenly very few heirs to the Tribe of Benjamin left, mostly young men who were out in the fields fighting and/or hiding. Young men who didn’t have wives or sons.
The book of Judges is a pretty evil book and the two stories that make it as far as Sunday School lessons, Samson & Delilah and Gideon, get cut, parsed, edited, Bawdlerized, mercilessly before we hear the end of the story. The Bible contains very few examples of what anybody would call Righteousness. Mostly it has to do with, as Little Alex described in A Clockwork Orange “a bunch of old yehudis running around smiting each other.”
Which brings up another book they can, officially in their own eyes at least, add to the bonfire.
Earlier in the narrative, Our Humble Narrator describes taking a couple of pre-teen lassies home and raping them.
Shakespeare, perhaps.
Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man” because it has a scene about the last books being hunted down, on Mars, to be Burned in the name of decency. Poe, Shakespeare, Dante, Hans Christian Andersen, Brothers Grimm, and of course the Bible.
Yeah, they’d burn books about bookburning. They get started, they don’t step until somebody stops them. Usually with a great deal of violence. We’d have to become them to stop them.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Most of the books will be taken away and executed at dawn in some formerly mothballed Steel Mill melt furnace. Without the ceremonial pitchfork bearing Mob and the bonfire.
But they’ll have to do that too, in limited doses, for Public Relations.
Dr David Kenneth Cochrane Registered Sex Offender Six Counts of rape including minors, three counts of indecent assault all involving patients dating back to the early millennium. Psychiatrist 6 months in Jail, 2 years probation, including 6 month license suspension. North Bay Canada Ontario and now re-employed for the regional health centre.