{"id":1467,"date":"2007-03-15T18:34:56","date_gmt":"2007-03-15T22:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cleek.lunarpages.com\/blogs\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2007-03-15T18:34:56","modified_gmt":"2007-03-15T22:34:56","slug":"damned-if-you-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=1467","title":{"rendered":"Damned if you do..."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/news.aol.com\/elections\/president\/story\/_a\/barack-obama-sues-pedophile-over-photos\/20070307164109990001\">AOL News<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>It's enough to make any father lash out in anger. A self-professed pedophile posts photos of your young daughters on his Web site, where he describes them as an \"angelic duo.\"<\/p>\n<p>It happened to Senator Barack Obama whose presidential campaign threatened legal action against Lindsay Ashford, a self-professed pedophile who handicapped the 2008 campaign by judging the \"cuteness\" of several presidential candidates' underage daughters and granddaughters. Attorneys who specialize in free speech say the campaign's handling of the issues raises some questions about the candidate's stance on civil rights.<\/p>\n<p>\"Individuals can make comments about the candidates and the candidates' children without running afoul of the law until someone crosses the line into actual or criminal activity,\" said Lawrence G. Walters, a lawyer who has handled many cases involving pornography and the Internet. \"For better or worse, pedophiles retain their free speech rights. If he's a professed pedophile and if he says, 'Let's try to find these kids,' then it could be in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, then he may be liable.\"<\/p>\n<p>No matter how distasteful the content of the website, Walters and Jonathan Katz, another First Amendment lawyer, were surprised that the Obama campaign had threatened legal action in this case.<\/p>\n<p>\"If Obama knows that his lawyer is doing this, then that's one reason not to vote for him,\" Katz said. \"These are clear free speech issues.\"<\/ul>\n<p>They aren't my kids, and I'm not even a father, so I can only imagine how furious I'd be if some lunatic was doing this to my kids. But, I imagine it'd be just about as mad as I've ever been. And 1<sup>st<\/sup> Amendment or not, I'd tell that lawyer to get where to stick his opinion, and his vote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From AOL News: It's enough to make any father lash out in anger. A self-professed pedophile posts photos of your young daughters on his Web site, where he describes them as an \"angelic duo.\" It happened to Senator Barack Obama whose presidential campaign threatened legal action against Lindsay Ashford, a self-professed pedophile who handicapped the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}