Walking backwards into the future

I hate living in Kansas.  I really do.

Not that there's anything wrong with the area itself - granted, there's not much to look at here, but we get some fun weather (especially if you love thunderstorms), and the people are, for the most part, nice.  It's just that somehow, our officials keep doing really stupid things that tend to reinforce the opinion many people already have that this is one of the more bassakwards places in the country to begin with.

Having our education board decide that students didn't need to be tested on the theory of evolution (and - since everyone teaches only what's needed for the big standardized tests, it meant that most teachers wouldn't bother teaching it any more - which was probably the point, but I digress).  Having "underaged sex" laws that penalize an older gay teen who has sex with a younger one with significatly more prison time than had it been a male-female couple doesn't help any either.

But now, oh, now they're just getting really silly.  Thanks to the vague ruling by the Supreme Court that declared "obscenity" to be pretty much whatever the "community" (most often as represented by the DA's office) decides it is, we now that the honour of being the state that just secured a federal conviction against a guy who had 2 pictures of nude adult women on his computer. 

Thanks to a plea bargain, this heinous criminal is going to be allowed to remain free (perish the thought!), but he does get to have the federal government watching over his shoulder anytime he goes online in the next two years.  He has to tell him his passwords, they can come check his computer anytime they want, and they can even attach tracking software to his computer so they can just watch everywhere he goes.  One wrong click, and he can go to jail.

I think, perhaps, the only thing worse than the fact that this poor guy is in legal trouble for looking at what most people I know (and yes, this includes Kansans) would consider to be run-of-the-mill legal pornography, is how he got in trouble for it in the first place. 

Apparnetly, he ordered photo copies of some electronic images, which included pictures of some young-looking women, through a Yahoo photo service.  Yahoo sent an email to tell him that they images might be illegal, so he cancelled the order.  You'd think that should be the end of it, but, obviously, it wasn't.  The postal inspector (apparently called in by Yahoo) got permission to deliver the order to this guy - even though he'd cancelled it! He was then busted on child pornography charges and his computer seized and searched.

When his lawyer pointed out that, essentially, the government had trapped him into committing an illegal act (by delivering the order he'd cancelled upon learning that it might be illegal), they dropped the child porn charges, but were loathe to lose the case entirely.  So, they decided that these two images of naked, adult women were offensive to Kansans, and as such, obscene, and offered him the plea bargain. 

Now, it's kind of hard to argue that the pictures aren't obscene when the definition of obscene is, well, obscenely vague.  How does one determine what the 'community standards' are?  And, as his lawyer noted, "when a respected member of the community is threatened not only with prison but with the stigma of a crime of perversion, it's pretty easy for them to accept the government's later settlement offer of a plea to an obscure offense and probation."

I can't wait to see what they come up with next.