Child pornography is illegal even if the pictures are drawn, a federal appeals panel said in affirming the first conviction under a 2003 federal law against such cartoons.

Dwight Whorley is serving 20 years in prison, convicted in 2005 of using a public computer for jobseekers at the Virginia Employment Commission to receive 20 Japanese cartoons, called anime, illustrating young girls being forced to have sex with men. Whorley also received digital photographs of actual children engaging in sexual conduct and sent and received e-mails graphically describing parents sexually molesting their children.

This case has been bothering me.

1. This guy ought to be in prison as there was real child porn involved. That fact might make it easy to overlook the rest of this case but I think that is a mistake.

2. 20 years is an extreme prison sentence. It seems overzealous here.

3. How much of that prison sentence was the product of the obscenity convictions? In my view, there is absolutely no place for obscenity laws in modern society. They were tossed upon the pyre of history in the 1960s alongside such barbarism as segregation and their resurrection by the federal government in 2005 is nothing less that social regression. It is a crime to posses and distribute real child pornography because those pictures violate the privacy of the children depicted. A cartoon has no privacy rights. This is pure thought crime. Its also a hole that has no bottom. If obscenity prosecutions are ignored in this context they'll spread to other contexts, consuming and banning as much as they can until their progress is halted.

4. Because there is no limit to what obscenity laws might prevent, WE have to decide where to draw the line. If we are unwilling to express offense at convictions for obscenity in this context, when and where will we express offense? In my view, there is a bright line that you can draw that says that ideas themselves, no matter how offensive, should not be a crime to express. I'm comfortable with that line. Holding that line means opposing this conviction. A conviction on child pornography possession ought to have been enough here. The overzealousness here serves no good.