Getting people talking to each other is a really important part of fostering positive change. This includes talking to those you disagree with because it’s the best way to hear about opposing views. What better place to hear about anti-porn activists’ logic than from anti-porn activist leaders themselves?

Iamcuriousblue made a brief video discussing the recent removal of the political pro-porn Facebook page that attracted the attention of leading anti-porn campaigners. Here’s some of their conversation:

PornHarms: The link in the first facebook post found in the first link of google caches provided in your description is to pornographic images. There are no age requirements, no way of stopping a young child from clicking on that and being forced to see porn. We did not report your page, but are very happy that such easy access to porn has been restricted by Facebook.

Iamcuriousblue: First, I’m not able to find the link that you’ve described.

Second, you’re saying that if somebody can trace a chain of links back to a page with adult content, that should be enough for a page to be flagged down? So how about when Gail Dines mentions Gagfactor(dot)com? All one has to do is put that into the address bar and you’ve linked to some very extreme imagery.

[…]

Also, I don’t appreciate the thinly-veiled threat you make regarding my supposed chain of links to adult content. Do you really want to play that way? I can certainly find *plenty* of such link chains at anti-porn sites, and graphic descriptions through people like Gail Dines. You *do not* want to open this Pandora’s Box.

So, according to the “Porn Harms” group lead by former Bush-era chief obscenity prosecutor Patrick Trueman, if a website links to another website and that second website has links to “pornographic images,” a definition that consistently varies by time and place and sometimes by mood, that first website (like the political pro-porn page) should be removed. That sounds a lot like an even stricter DMCA, doesn’t it?

If such a policy were law, I’m pretty sure I would be a criminal today. Maybe you should go check your website and blog right now, follow every single link, and then follow every single link that the pages those links point to link to. Would you be a criminal, too? Would you even know how to update your site if the pages on the other sites change? (You could, of course, try Cleanternet.org.)

By the same token, it seems anti-porn groups are not so fond of the idea of removing their own content or censoring their own speech based on the same logic. After all, wasn’t it anti-porn activist Gail Dines who earned the dubious honor of “perhaps becoming the first person to utter the words ‘cum dumpster’ at a Capitol Hill press event?” Amanda Hess, who attended the press event, reports:

The porn bashers, like [maymay and other] kink educators, quickly upload videos of their day of speeches, placing the content just a Google search away from kids. Dines’ lecture in particular reads like a road map to hard-core porn consumption: “If you go to Gagfactor.com, you’ll see a 20-second clip of a scene with a young woman they call Scarlett.” The “clip opens with Scarlett sitting on a toilet, having a penis thrust down her throat, while the man attached to the penis pulls her head back and forward.”

(Emphasis mine.)

So why, pray tell, if we are to follow anti-porn logic, should only politically oppositional content, like mine, be removed?