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Imagine a law that makes it a crime punishable by 30 years in prison to doodle a drawing and keep it in your drawer, showing it to nobody. Could such a law be consistent with US's First Amendment guarantee of free expression?

Apparently it could if it had been enacted around the turn of the century, in the midst of America's obsession with the sexual purity of the young. Two federal appellate courts have upheld the "Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996." But on December 17, the Ninth Circuit appeals court in San Francisco struck the law down in a two-to-one ruling that sets the stage for a US Supreme Court review. The high court could either limit the expanding range of paintings, photos, books, now proscribed in the US as "kiddie porn," send censorship speeding on in new directions,

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eading to raids of museums, libraries, and gay archives.

The 1996 law extends the draconian penalties for so-called "child pornography" to purely imaginary images-- everything from doodles scrawled on a paper napkin to high-tech computer simulations. Indeed, the law makes kiddie porn out of everything from the Bible to a photo of a ham sandwich-- anything that "appears to be," "conveys the impression" of being, or is merely "presented" as being a sexually explicit image of a minor.

The Ninth Circuit ruled these standards were too vague, agreeing with the Free Speech Coalition (a consortium of porn producers), a company that sells nudist videos, and an artist who paints nudes.

The court's majority decision notes that the Supreme Court had upheld the ban on production, sale, and possession of kiddie porn based on the alleged harm to the minors portrayed. But the 1996 law, the Ninth Circuit declared, banned purely imaginary images based not on harm to any portrayed minor, but on the images' supposed ill effects.

If the Supreme Court goes along with the broadened standard that this Ninth Circuit ruling rejects, then the US prohibitions on kiddie porn can be expected to extend, as it has already in Canada, from visual depictions to the mere written word.