On pornography
I would like to let you know my opinion regarding pornography in Indonesia.
Indonesia is composed of many groups with their own languages, taboos, customs, freedoms, courting habits, senses of morality and religions.
The moral values of a group of retired army officers and their wives frequenting a golf-course in Jakarta are not the same as those of a crowd of young people dancing in an expensive disco in Jakarta.
What appears permissible in Kebayoran among bright young people would be looked on with horror by the kampung people of South Flores or Padang.
Of course all these groups must be subject to a basic strongly enforced criminal law. They must not be allowed to assault or pillage or rape or rob one another.
But tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another.
The law may not enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for sincere reasons, refuse to accept it. One can not legislate virtue. For thousands of years, many legislators, kings and dictators have tried to legislate virtue, and all have failed.
If some people consider some books, CD's, TV programs as pornographic, it is their right not to buy that book or video or not to watch that TV program.
Censors always divide the society into the sensible and the idiotic, the strong and the weaker people, and we all know, of course, where we belong.
The assumption is that there is always a citizen of the weak variety, who, at the glimpse of a pornographic magazine, would go uncontrollably mad and run to his neighbor's wife, ready to rape her.
This ridiculous attitude of censorship depends on the assumption that there is a superior type of person qualified to tell the rest of us what is good for us to watch or read.
In the Netherlands and in Denmark pornography has been freely available for the past 25 years.
There has been no increase in rape cases, sexually related crimes, on the contrary, there are less sex crimes over there since porno is available everywhere.
A rapist, and it doesn't matter whether he is a Christian or a Muslim, will always be a rapist, whether pornographic material is available or not.
DIRK VLEUGELS
Denpasar, Bali