Even though the American constitution doesn’t protect obscene media as its goal, it does and will alway will because of subjectivity.

As selective enforcement grows, more and more normal well meaning people will be guilty of crimes that they may or may not know exist. That’s not to say one should be anti-government as government is only as good as the people who put leaders in power.

Manga is fiction, media, and art. If sexual material is deemed obscene then so should violence. So if one makes a murder crime movie, the buyers of the movie should be charged with the crimes relating to movie or the thoughts and planning of committing such a crime. Extreme example, but relevant.

One may say to themselves that they would have fought these charges to the bitter end, but then you may realize that you’re about to lose everything and that this effects your friends and family.

I believe anyone put into such a situation should not give in. Try to be respectful, but surely give them hell when someone says or implies something outrageous. Punishment of normally lawful citizens should not be accepted with this. Good intentions of people involved with this case is debatable. On one hand it’s just simply not knowing, but it soon become ignorance after a point in time.

Background:
Christopher Handley is a fairly long time manga fan who served the US Navy, managed to gather a collection of well over a thousand such books, a comfortable career in computers, and is in good will with his family. The guy also plays games online, but apparently that is not socially acceptable in the state of Iowa even in 2010. Before the official sentence, a push to ban the person from computers was made like how some places ban alcoholics from buying liquor. Makes one wonder how often such suggestions are made with actual pedophiles.

Basically his order of manga that he imported was inspected before being picked up and driven home. On the way home he has a face full of cops and serious biz dress up people raiding him. Roughly 80 of his 1200 manga were seen as offensive in the case with many of those being yaoi and lolicon. There has been information about how characters in the yaoi comics were pushed to be seen as underage.

CBLDF or Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a consulting group that helps people charged with obscene comic related cases and the people representing them. The CBLDF believes comics should be treated as any other form of expression. If you’d like to find out more about them or if you wish to donate, visit CBLDF.org

The image above is more of an expression of emotion than anything else.

Feel free to drop a comment here with your view or post in the recent related forum thread about this case and how it impacts manga.