Welcome to the US of A, moral quagmire.

[Hep]

Is this what the moral discourse in our country has come to, or is it just Texas? I'm fuming. I want action. I want heads to roll.

From the Dallas Observer:


The service was fast, the judgments even hastier. Never did Jacqueline Mercado imagine that four rolls of film dropped off at an Eckerd Drugs one-hour photo lab near her home would turn her life inside out, threaten to send her to jail and prompt the state to take away her kids.
For Mercado and her family, last fall was a happy time, one they wanted to record and save in the venerable tradition of the family photo. Johnny Fernandez, Mercado's boyfriend, had just emigrated from Lima, Peru, ending a yearlong separation, and on top of that, it was their son's first birthday.

The photographs they took over several days in late October included pictures of Fernandez reunited with the family at their modest home in suburban Richardson. Others captured their 1-year-old son Rodrigo, and 4-year-old Pablizio, from Mercado's earlier marriage, playing in a neighborhood park. Using the camera's timer, they also took three snapshots of themselves, naked in their bed. They arranged their bodies in ways that showed less flesh than most freeway billboards.

A half-dozen others recorded the kids at bath time. Fernandez took several photos of the boys "playing around," naked and innocent, with the oldest flashing a big smile. Mercado, who says she often bathed with the kids, is in several of the shots unclothed from the waist up, holding her arm modestly across her bare chest.

In one--the photo that would threaten to send Mercado and her boyfriend to prison--the infant Rodrigo is suckling her left breast.


Find out what happened:

http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2003-04-17/feature2.html/1/index.html

[Wickerman]

1. Repression is remarkable

and deadly. People can't get their little minds aroudn the fact that a woman's naked breast doesn't have to be sexual, it can be viewed as a beautiful, life giving force. Geeeeeeez.

"Their most pressing problem was the breast-feeding picture, which the indictment characterized as sexual, "to wit; actual lewd exhibition of...a portion of the female breast below the top of the areola, and the said defendant did and then employ, authorize and induce Rodrigo Fernandez, a child younger than 18 years of age, to engage in said sexual conduct and sexual performance." In other words, says Chatham, the act of simulated breast-feeding, captured on film, was being portrayed as a sex act. "They're saying the guy who took the picture is a sicko and wanted a photo of this to satisfy his sexual desire."

Through the ages, Chatham says, images of breast-feeding have been viewed more as art than deviancy.

"Look at this," he says, handing over a print of The Lucca Madonna, painted in 1436 by the Dutch master Jan van Eyck. The painting, depicting an enthroned Mary suckling the baby Jesus, hangs in the Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, an art museum in Frankfurt, Germany."

[Hep]

2. It's just amazing

Some cop sprung wood and the outlet of his guilt is taking this couple's family away.

[demnan]

3. Dirty minds

turn everything dirty. What a repressed ridiculous thing to do - locking up a woman for breast feeding her son and the husband for recording this beautiful, natural act on film.

As for the rest, hey every parent takes those playful pictures of their little kids on the toilet or in the bath. How else are you going to totally embarass your kids later on in front of their girl/boyfriends?