Coffee or T (and A)?

Well, its been a hard few days...things are rolling in what could be a new direction for me, so if all goes well I'll blog whats been going on after the dust settles... Did you catch (how could you miss it?) the hubbub over the game GTA3: San Andreas? Apparently, there are viewable sex scenes of the playable character and his "girlfriends" to be accessed in the game with a mod patch that unlocks them. The patch is known as the "hot coffee" patch, which I find hilarious... Of course, politicians (namely Hillary Clinton) saw an opportunity to tighten the screws on censorship even more and jumped on the bandwagon calling for stricter rules, and boards, and commitees, and fines, and legistlation, and basically the government sticking its nose in even further into What. You. Are. Doing. With. Your. Own. Life. The game was already rated Mature, by the ESRB, which puts ratings on all games. This means that if you're playing the game, you should be old enough to already know about sex, right and wrong, real life versus video games, and have a healthy growing cynicism towards all things related to government. If you're playing the game and you're not old enough to know about all that, then somebody's parents are asleep at the wheel. That's the real issue here, isn't it? People want the government and legislation to take care of their parenting for them. Instead of teaching and guiding children to make their own decisions based on knowledge and a moral code, and then keeping a watchful eye on what said children are doing, people would rather have a thousand 'Cybernanny' programs installed on their computers so they don't have to do any of that while the kid surfs the net in their bedroom. The weird thing about all this is, the uproar on GTA is about the hidden sex scenes that you have to put an effort into to see of PIXELATED, computer generated characters. It's not even real sex between real people! All this flack about the sex and I don't seem to be hearing much about the violence you can inflict in the game. So, the message is that playing a character who can shoot, stab, beat, drive over, and do just about anything to any character in the game is ok? However, watching that character have sex in pixelated form is going to be the end of civilization? I always thought this was a little weird. Violence in media forms (movies, music, games, etc) gets a much easier pass in today's age than sex. Everybody gets panicky when sex is involved in any form. However, in real life, having consensual sex with someone is a completely natural act and a big part of life and the ongoing of the species. Last I heard, perforating someone with a machine gun is not a natural act. Isn't this whole sex / violence hoopla backwards? Also, from what I've heard, it's an American (or Western) thing. Europe is different, in that sex is much more acceptable in the various media, but there are harder rules on violence...could be wrong on that though. Anyway, it just seems that people are getting bent out of shape over the wrong things. Also, it's not the governments job to make sure your kids turn out well and don't see things that are too much for them at impressionable ages. It's the parents job. A demanding and difficult one to be sure, but it comes with the territory. I don't have kids, nor do I ever want to. However, I know there is no bigger responsiblity on earth than to raise children, and it doesn't seem to me that enough people are considering all the angles, pressures, and responsibility before diving in and enlarging the gene pool. If the government wants to get involved in maintaining kids, maybe they should get involved ahead of the curve and try maintaining parents. You need a license to drive a car, a license to shoot a gun, collateral to buy a house, but anyone can have a kid without any prerequisites whatsoever. Something odd about that, I tell ya... Anyway, end rant ;-)