Petition re I Want Your Love

I always have reservations about petitions. Sometimes I link to them regardless of reservations, thinking that my readers might be interested (and should make up their own minds).

I really don’t have any reservations in this case. Or if I do, it’s that petitions are not necessarily very effective in the short term. At the least, however, they can provide rallying points.

In signing the petition against the banning, in Australia, of I Want Your Love, I wrote:  “This is an inexcusable example of censorship. I am not totally opposed to censorship, but it should always have a very strong justification. In this case, it’s utterly puzzling what the justification could possibly be – e.g. this is not a movie that incites or glorifies violence. It can have no tendency to produce a more dangerous or callous society.”

Let me be clear. Even if some movie did show a “tendency to produce a more dangerous or callous society” I don’t necessarily think that would justify banning it. I think it must take a bit more than that to justify upstream laws. Still, in this instance it’s hard to find even the beginning of a case to ban I Want Your Love.