I'm not buying the hacker thing. It's an easy excuse that lots of people are wont to latch onto, but it was almost immediately discredited by amazon. Plus, you know, hackers lie.

I would point out that unlike a conventional bookstore, kids (and me) can't exactly turn to the trashy parts and giggle in the store. They'd have to buy the book to read the glorious trashiness, and to do that they certify that they are above a certain age. The system already filters out the possibility of 10-year-olds using amazon for porn.

But again, this wasn't a matter of trashy romance novels getting punished. It was Heather Has Two Mommies and Dead Boys Can’t Dance, neither of which could be confuse with smut. The former has literally NO sexual content, and the index of the latter, a book about the connection between homophobia and teen suicide, lists only one page as being related to "sexual activity".

P.S. I wouldn't alter a stance based on reaction of the opposition. They'll say that no matter what we do.

As one of the plaintiffs in 13 years of ACLU litigation against censorship on the Web, I have to say that it's risky for us to go along with the idea that "under-18-safe" areas must be created in online commerce.

The very purpose of all that federal legislation (the CDA, COPA and others) that we fought so hard to defeat was to eventually blur the line between porn and non-porn, or erotic and non-erotic. This way, the religious fanatics who abound in the U.S. can make sure that the most innocuous and non-erotic book mentioning the word "gay" would eventually be considered "harmful" or "indecent" for children to see.

This is because the federal laws allowed for complaints to invoke the principle of "local community standards of morality." Meaning that the stuffiest Bible believer in Arkansas could shut down Amazon sales of not just LGBT material, but books relating to ANY subject that ultraconservative religious people don't want their children to read, like books advocating abortion or birth control or feminism, or books questioning the authority of the Church.

So believe me, if COPA had been allowed to stand by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion. Why? Because Amazon.com would have been one of the first targets of a complaint. Amazon likely would have cut off the sales of ANY books that could be considered "controversial," including all its non-erotic LGBT titles, rather than face federal prosecution, including the super-heavy fines that would be levied.

What WAS established, during this 13 years of fierce litigation, was that parents have a right to install filters on their home computers, so they can control what their children see on the Web. Their own home is the place for parents to do this monitoring. They have no right to try institutionalizing their controls in the marketplace where their cherished beliefs may run counter to the cherished beliefs of others. It should not be Amazon's job to babysit these people's kids and keep them from seeing this and that.

And I trust the good judgment and common sense of professional booksellers like Amazon.com to avoid listing books that are real hard-core pornography. Real porn is clearly defined by existing laws; it is also illegal and has been for a long time. So Amazon can keep porn out of its listings without installing its own censorship system or treading on the toes of any author or publisher whose works have "social or literary value."