A note about minors' rights in general, that gets back on the topic of Internet censorship towards the end, so read the whole thing.

The First Amendment says fake scientists can write about the "black stupidity gene", ex-Nazis can campaign for state governor, and a Kansas minister can go to funerals of gay men with signs saying "AIDS cures fags". The point is not to take these people's rights away -- their rights are as important as anyone else's -- but if you can support free speech for people like that, you ought to be able to support the rights of people under 18 as well.

This Web site was created because we don't accept the excuses for treating minors with fewer rights than convicted felons. Smut on the Internet -- you're going to be harmed more by eating a hamburger than by seeing a picture of two people having sex (at least the hamburger has something bad in it like cholesterol; the picture doesn't do anything). Sex in the movies -- it's insulting to victims of real crime that you once could have gone to jail in Ohio for showing Shakespeare in Love to a minor, since it got an R rating for showing Gwynyth Paltrow's breasts for about five seconds. These are not good enough reasons for treating 40 million Americans as if their rights are not important.

If you lived at home when you turned 18, did your family fall apart just because you suddenly had all these rights as a human being? If you're under 18, do you think your family would fall apart if you got all of those rights tomorrow? You'd probably still live with your parents anyway (even most 18-year-olds do), and your parents always have the right to decide what's for dinner if they're cooking it. Other countries have different ages of majority, and people don't sue their parents as soon as they become full citizens, they mostly stay where the free food is. So much for minors' rights "tearing apart the moral fabric of society".

Where minors' rights would make a difference, would be for people under 18 who die because state laws ban them from seeing a real doctor if their parents would rather use "faith healers". Or for the college-bound students in Kansas, where the board of education dropped evolution from the science curriculum under pressure from parents' groups, echoing Pat Buchanan that "parents have the right to insist that godless evolution not be taught to their children". Or teenagers that want to date a member of another race, even though Gallup said in 1994 that most white American parents disapproved of interracial relationships, but most of their kids disagreed. (Maybe some "moral fabrics" need tearing.)

So, our information on disabling blocking software is mostly symbolic. For a few people, it will be their only way to get vital information on AIDS or birth control, but for everybody else, it's just the principle of the thing: Think for yourself before you're 18.