Innocence before Freedom of Expression

This is yet another attempt by the government of some "free" nation to censor, under threat of imprisonment, any type of expression of intergenerational sexual desire. Now they are considering cartoon characters to be "people"?? Of course cartoon characters are not people, the government is simply using this interpretation as an excuse to criminalize all possible expressions of a very genuine but extremely unpopular form of sexual desire. The only recourse is to go underground with it, where some less savory people will be attracted to it and where it can enable the government to claim that all people who have this desire are demonic beings who commit all manner of horrific atrocities, and that all of us are like the few truly bad apples that the underground tends to attract. Shutting this type of sexual desire out of the public eye only serves to help the government reinforce the cultural belief that such desires aren't common but are truly "deviant," and that everyone with these desires are evil monsters.

This also attempts to deny the fact that children and teens also have sexual desires, even if these desires are not exactly the same as adults. Then again, South Park has become very popular for the type of humor that comes from depicting children doing things that only adults are supposed to know and do in our culture. But when it comes to having or depicting sexual activity, we are completely forbidden to show it in any way. This is basically criminalizing any type of challenge to the sacrosanct cultural idea that children are completely asexual and that any depiction of them engaging in sexual activity destroys their beloved innocence. So much so that we aren't even allowed to imagine kids being sexual beings, even in a humorous or a parodying context designed to poke fun at our puritanical attitude towards youths. After all, cartoons are simply someone's imagination given expression via drawn or computer generated pictures, and any government that criminalizes this form of expression has obviously gone over the deep end. Children's innocence is not worth protecting if we must destroy democracy and freedom of speech in order to do so.