Humiliated congressman wants to ban photo-shopping

A congressional Democrat  from Georgia, angry that his head was photo-shopped onto a picture of a porn star reacted in typical Capitol Hill elitist fashion: He called for a law banning photo-shopping. 
 

Rep. Earnest Smith wants to make it a crime after being humiliated by the phony porn image created by a blogger who apparently has fun mocking Smith.

The Augusta legislator said he was not worried that the bill would trample on First Amendment rights.

“Everyone has a right to privacy,” he told Fox News.com. “No one has a right to make fun of anyone. It’s not a First Amendment right.”

Wow. If we’re going to make it a crime to make fun of people, thousands of blogs (including this one) would have to shut down.

An outspoken libertarian, attorney Jonathan Turley writes this:

“It is Smith’s understanding of free speech rather than aesthetics that concern me. His new misdemeanor crime would apply to the alteration of any photograph that ‘causes an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction.’”

As one conservative website, GOPUSA, points out, plenty of legal avenues exist to pursue if one feels defamed. Parody, on the other hand, is often treated as an exception.

GOPUSA suggests that Facebook’s ranks would be considerably thinned if a law banning mean-spirited photo-shopping was enforced. After all, every White House photo of the president is clearly marked, in futility, as an image that cannot be altered or edited.