Indeed; I often find that people feel that something which is offensive to them ought to be illegal. If asked for reasoning, they generally simply assert, “well, that’s just wrong!” Really the problem is that people confuse legality, ethics, and morality, and see nothing wrong with submitting their personal emotions in lieu of precedent and reasoned consideration of legal principles.

It is interesting to me that some people who support these measures – the Filipino ban, UK law, and Japanese censorship – oppose other impositions of community standards on minority groups. A great many people in the anime blogosphere do not look favorably upon California proposition 8, for instance, yet the logic there is the same: something which harms no one is essentially being disallowed because voters find it offensive. The same principles are involved, and I fear that once we set foot on allowing whimsy as a justification for law we head down a slippery slope.