Robbie Swan is a good friend of ours and is always fighting the good fight, this is a letter he recently sent to the The Mercury, Hobart (Sat 15 Apr 2006).
And violence?
Senator Guy Barnett's push to block children from having access to explicit sexual material and extreme violence in libraries (Letters, April 11) is laudable but will not work, mostly because he does not believe his own rhetoric.
For sure, he has sex in his sights and he will pursue erotica and pornography with the zeal of the morals campaigner.
But when it comes to pursuing "extreme violence" it's amazing how often this aspect of his crusade seems to fall off the agenda. If he is serious about stopping access to extreme violence then he will have to include about 3000 gruesome R-rated films that show people being decapitated, disembowelled, raped, murdered and tortured that are displayed on the websites of the nation's major film distributors.
He'll also have to filter news broadcasts which show people blown to pieces in car bombs in the Middle East, extreme right-wing hate speech sites and a host of other extreme violence sites of varying shades.
Oh, and while he's about it will he have the courage of his convictions to ban children's eyes from Mel Gibson's gruesome religious spectacle, The Passion of the Christ? Or does he see this as "religious instruction" and quite OK for 15-year-olds in the local library? Pornography, like violence, is often in the eye of the beholder.
Robbie Swan
Eros Association inc
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