Sex Writer On "Obscene" Website Sentenced To Home Detention

Posted by Brian Fairbanks

 

A woman whose website, Red Rose Stories, was shuttered three years ago by the Feds, pleaded guilty yesterday to obscenity charges and received a long term of probation plus six months of home confinement.

Wait, fiftysomething years after Howl and Naked Lunch, they're still busting people for "obscenity," particularly on the internet? We had to find out just what the site could have presented that could get its owner in so much trouble...

Karen Fletcher is the owner of Red Rose Stories. She's a 56-year-old Pennsylvania woman who happens to live in the district covered by crusading US attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, a staple of the Alberto Gonzales/George W. Bush Justice Department and her website contained

stories that allegedly involved bestiality, water sports, scat, bondage and domination, S&M, slavery, threesomes, orgies and sex with children.

Note that not one of Fletcher's pages featured photos of any kind, nor did the site explicitly encourage real-life encounters with children. After her arrest, Fletcher quipped that, to her, it seemed "the only legal sex stories are those that involve a man and a woman consenting to missionary position sex in a dark room.”

Buchanan "has gone on a rampage trying to stamp out expression that doesn't meet her standards of morality," Marc John Randazza, a law professor at the Barry University School of Law in Orlando, wrote on his blog.

Randazza, who teaches about free speech rights and other legal issues, acknowledges that the content of Red Rose Stories was shocking, but he suggested the U.S. Constitution protects fictional stories. "If you believe in the Constitution, and you believe in what this country means, you can NOT believe that any American should ever face prison for writing fiction -- no matter what the subject matter of that fiction might be," he wrote in a blog post.

What do you think? Was Fletcher a fool for writing about child sex and enjoying it?  

Via Anarchist Librarians and PC World.


Comments

Mandy said:

So what would they do with Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita?"

August 8, 2008 12:57 PM

tamaulipas said:

This is absolutely not constitutional and would be struck down by the Supreme Court--even the current Supreme Court. I mean, if this is legal, anyone who owns a copy of Allan Moore's Lost Girls should be running scared. That had sex with children and drawings.

August 8, 2008 1:31 PM

fitandfun71 said:

This sentence is sad and scary.  It almost wants me to burn my J.D. diploma.

August 8, 2008 2:48 PM

fabul1st said:

Someone should send her a copy of the first amendment:  

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ..."

"no law" Seems pretty clear to me.

August 8, 2008 3:10 PM

fitandfun71 said:

You can lead some judges to water but you can't make them drink.

August 8, 2008 3:42 PM

Jon said:

Scooter Libby wrote a book of fiction that contained a scene about a ten-year-old girl forced to have sex with a trained bear?  I wonder when he's gonna get locked up for that - or, did Bush's pardon cover this crime?    

August 10, 2008 1:57 AM

About Brian Fairbanks

Brian Fairbanks, the Senior National Political Correspondent for Nerve, is a filmmaker living in Brooklyn or New Orleans, depending on the season. He is a heavily-armed advocate of gun control.

in