Re: Tennessee seizing property of 'sex offenders'

"Too bad if he was simply downloading CP he harmed no child. So it should not even get to the point of whether the state could seize the house because logically he harmed no one and committed no offense.

"Child porn laws are so fucking stupid. Going by the rational behind the laws any pics or videos of murder (adult/child) or rape (adult/child) or hell of any crime should be illegal."

Actually, the rationale for the child porn laws in the U.S. is that they do harm the children in question. This is why cartoons remain legal in the United States, and even Philip Greaves' book was clearly legal - he was just prosecuted anyway because a jerk in Florida figured he could get away with it. Murder victims cannot be further harmed, so images of their murder are not held to the same standard.

However, that is the rationale for the laws, but it is not the reason for them. The reason for the laws is to provide scapegoats for the public to hate, and to make a show of punishing those scapegoats to pretend that the justice system is dispensing vengeance against "the other" on behalf of "us". In the absence of a sufficient number of easy targets, real villains create ersatz placeholders to be punished in their stead - and the rationale is provided as window-dressing.

Of course the idea that viewing photographs will harm their subjects (in and of itself) is superstitious nonsense. While one might make reasonable arguments against producing and distributing such photographs, criminalizing possession is simply fanaticism, and applying forfeiture laws is simply a pretext for theft.