Crap. I was brought up in the theocracy that was the Republic of Ireland, and "totalitarian" and "anti-democratic" are accurate adjectives. It's totalitarian because the Church sought to regulat every part of your life, including your thoughts ('thought crime' is a very familiar term to survivors of Catholicism like myself). It's anti-democratic because religion is, by its very nature, anti-democratic - scripture's scripture, and you have to follow it. The Catholic Church is run by an old man in an Italian city-state with a hierarchy of other old men who give orders and are completely unaccountable to their victims (sorry, 'parishioners'). Catholicism is far, far worse than Scientology, at least in Ireland were it's State-backed and obligatory, and its ordinances reach even unto non-believers (hence all the women who travel to the UK for abortions because the misogynist pricks that run the Church have banned it). At least you've a choice whether or not to be a Scientologist, and if you so choose then more bloody fool you.

That's complete bollox, that is. If you were a Catholic in Eire and you didn't come to Mass, the local priest would be calling at your door wanting to know why you weren't there, and he could and would give you serious grief if you didn't turn up next Sunday. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Pleasingly, the Church in Ireland is having done to it what it's done to all those kids over the decades: being fucked up the arse. The days when you'd have to bow and scrape to your local priest because he had an almost literal power of life and death over you are now over - now he's just a weirdo in a black dress who can't have sex like normal folk (and as a result is seriously fucked-up in the head).

Yep, that's about the size of it. The State is playing a long game here. Everything, but everything about children gets stored in the database, including their DNA profiles. The scheme has been highly controversial over here, but in time the fuss will die over and it'll just become an accepted part of life. The next generation is going to have an awful shock waiting for it when it reaches adulthood and becomes uppity and rebellious. The 'rationales' for the scheme chime with public and media 'concerns', with cases of child abuse (Baby P) and abductions (Maddy) making the front pages every other week, and South Park slogan 'think of the children!' being public policy. How can a right-minded person possibly oppose a scheme that will, or so the State says, 'safeguard' children throughout their lives? The perfect smokescreen, carefully constructed over a decade of media manipulation.

The definition of child porn is so slippery that any site/newsgroup where there are images of underage persons could be so defined, even when the people are clothed. If they're considered to be 'posing lewdly' (dancing to a Beyonce number, say) that counts as CP, which includes pix teens take of each other. When I was a teen we took 'lewd' pix of ourselves in photobooths and passed them around - these days teens use phone cams and post pix to mySpace, and indeed some have been arrested for CP for posting 'lewd' pix of themselves and have ended up on the Sex Offender's Register, which is positively Kafkaesque. The problem lies in the central principle of CP, which is that it's not the content of the pic which is at issue but what effect that pic might have in a pedo's mind, which effectively means that what pedos might get turned on by determines what's legal and not. By focussing on intentions rather than consequences CP is effectively a thought crime.

One side-effect (or maybe even primary purpose) of site blocking is that sexual information sites and fora for teens will be caught up in the net. Teens love to talk about sex and sexuality, and are desperate to a) get frank information and b) read other's experiences - the Net is an absolute boon for them. Because CP has such a wide definition, and is based on what a pedo might be turned on by, info and discussion sites will be classed as CP, blocked by ISPs, and the site admins arrested. This would suit many moral conservatives who think that "children" should remain forever innocent, and teens should be shielded from sexuality or penalised if they do actually get up to any 'unpleasantness'. 'For the sake of the children' is just a figleaf for sexual repression, for such moralists, and you can be sure their mucky paws are all over these recent measures.