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Australian Judge Grants “Real Boy” Status to Bart Simpson

December 10th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

Justice Michael Adams of the New South Wales Supreme Court recently upheld the conviction of a man charged with possessing child pornography after cartoons depicting Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson engaging in sex acts were found on the defendant’s computer. It’s disturbing enough that a citizen of a developed country* could be convicted of a crime for private consumption of lewd drawings. What puts this ruling into the realm of the absurd is the reasoning underlying the decision.

The central question of the case seems to be whether or not the cartoons could possibly depict real people. The defendant appealed on the ground that they couldn’t. In his ruling, Justice Geppetto Adams concluded that being entirely fictional and anatomically unrealistic didn’t keep the characters from being considered real people by the law. Since the characters were real, the drawings therefore depicted real children having sex, and were thus child porn.

It would be laughable if it didn’t involve the conviction of a man for a serious crime which comes with a huge social stigma. A fictional character is in no way a real person. A cartoon character doesn’t have any rights of its own. It can’t sign a contract. It can’t bring a lawsuit. It can’t own property, because fictional characters are property. They can be bought and sold, and protected by copyright laws. You can’t sell a person, and you can’t copyright one either.

Justice Adams’ subsequent discussion of the purpose of the law is equally unsettling. After stating the primary purpose (to prevent people abusing children and taking pictures), he stated that the secondary purpose of the law was to prevent the production of material that could “fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children.”

Implicit in that statement is the unfounded assumption that consuming tastelessly sexual cartoons of animated kids somehow leads to the desire to see real children abused and molested. There isn’t any evidence of this, of course, so either the law, or the judge’s interpretation of it, is based on a completely unsupported assumption. If we let people see naughty cartoons, they’ll want to watch bad men do nasty things to defenseless children. Really? Well, we shouldn’t let folks watch horror movies then, or in no time at all they’ll be going online looking for snuff films.

It is entirely appropriate for the law to forbid child pornography. This is an activity that harms children in a terrible, fundamental way. But banning this cartoon, in the complete absence of any proof that it actually contributes to harm to children, opens the door for a government to ban any media which is suspects of leading to bad behavior. It is incumbent on all people who treasure their freedom to condemn this expansion of government power to restrict the right of adults to consume unpopular media.

In the mean time, the Simpson kids have been on the air for 18 years. Since they’re real people, one hopes that they’ll soon be able to vote.

* And if you think it couldn’t happen here, go read this post by Neil Gaiman about the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and why it’s invaluable.

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