A woman whose website, Red Rose Stories, was shuttered three years ago by the Feds, pleaded guilty yesterday to obscenity charges and received a long term of probation plus six months of home confinement.
Wait, fiftysomething years after Howl and Naked Lunch, they're still busting people for "obscenity," particularly on the internet? We had to find out just what the site could have presented that could get its owner in so much trouble...
Karen Fletcher is the owner of Red Rose Stories. She's a 56-year-old Pennsylvania woman who happens to live in the district covered by crusading US attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, a staple of the Alberto Gonzales/George W. Bush Justice Department and her website contained
stories that allegedly involved bestiality, water sports,
scat, bondage and domination, S&M, slavery, threesomes, orgies and
sex with children.
Note that not one of Fletcher's pages featured photos of any kind, nor did the site explicitly encourage real-life encounters with children. After her arrest, Fletcher quipped that, to her, it seemed "the only legal sex stories are those that involve a man and
a woman consenting to missionary position sex in a dark room.”
Buchanan "has gone on a rampage trying to stamp out expression that
doesn't meet her standards of morality," Marc John Randazza, a law
professor at the Barry University School of Law in Orlando, wrote on
his blog.
Randazza,
who teaches about free speech rights and other legal issues,
acknowledges that the content of Red Rose Stories was shocking, but he
suggested the U.S. Constitution protects fictional stories. "If you
believe in the Constitution, and you believe in what this country
means, you can NOT believe that any American should ever face prison
for writing fiction -- no matter what the subject matter of that
fiction might be," he wrote in a blog post.
What do you think? Was Fletcher a fool for writing about child sex and enjoying it?
Via Anarchist Librarians and PC World.
