With how much I go to FA...

...I have to say this.

If you're going to leave that archive because they chose the road both of least administrative work for a free site, but more importantly the road of least censorship, please ask yourselves why you were even there in the first place in a place that allows art depicting drug-use, openly sexual art at all, violence, robbery, or any number of other equally-illegal crimes, some of which carry higher penalties than being convicted of being a pedophile.

The "slippery slope" may be as overused as "It's to protect the children!" to my ears, but it doesn't make the former quote any less valid a way to refute the latter quote. If you support censorship of artwork at any level, you are still supporting censorship of artwork. Any 'moral' arguments you make to the contrary are still arguments supporting censorship. And at the same time, you can already opt out of seeing adult artwork at all, and FA is adding support for much higher-granularity blocking of artwork you don't want to see. Don't like it? Guess what, like LJ, you aren't being forced to view everyone's journal entries. Don't argue for a ban when a simple 'Ignore' will function just as well.

And if the above makes you want off my friends list, lemme know. This is just about the only time I'll ever actually remove someone from my actual friends list instead of just my default view, is over issues like censorship, and by request to boot. My outlook is that it is not for myself, or anyone else, to judge another's choices of artwork to draw or share. The risk is entirely their own, and they can and will be judged properly in their own time. But not by me. I may choose not to associate with them, but I have no right to make outright judgements on them.

A clarification...

...my previous entry was badly worded in the last paragraph. I did not mean to imply that if you disagreed with me, I wanted to remove you as a friend. I respect differences of opinion with my friends, but I also understand that this type of issue may be sensitive enough that my viewpoints may make some people (for whatever reasons of their own) distrust me as a friend. Honestly, I don't believe I've changed any from what they knew of me before, to now, but I've simply clarified my stance on something.

I would also like to point out, that while all the art being discussed is something I have pretty much no desire to see (it's hard to accept such an arbitrary line like '18 years old' as a demarcation between old enough and too young, considering when I lost my virginity by choice, but as most 'cub' art is well under 12, I have absolutely no desire at all to see anything approaching PG-13, let along X-rated, involving 'cub' personas at all) but I do not believe trying to ban something vague like 'cub porn' is actually feasable in the first place. Just because something disgusts me, doesn't mean it's possible to word a fair and abuse-proof rule to prevent it's inclusion in an art archive. Note the 'fair' and 'abuse proof' requirements for such rules.

As an experiment, try to word a rule (as long and complicated as you want) that will ban all 'cub porn' from a furry art gallery, regardless of wildly varying style, skill level, and levels of anthropomorphization, without catching any art by mistake. At what level of anthro do you have to assume a creature abides by their 'basis critter' lifespan and development cycle, versus a more human one? In many cases, that would make any erotica featuring numerous species completely impossible under some arbitrary 'age limit' able to be reasonably argued (in some people's minds) as falling under that category. The wearing of 'baby fur' garb? There's people well into their 30's in real life that do that, so, again, that's not a valid seperator either. Let the admins pick and choose 'based on their feelings' perhaps? That causes nothing but claims of random censorship, and a chaotic mess of claims of abuse of both users reporting 'questionable' artwork, and admins that watch for those specific reports because they have a personal agenda. Even if some of the ideas above sound crazy to you, I've seen all of the above approaches argued before at least once for ways to 'ban' cub art, or other similair things.