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On August 8, Karen Fletcher will likely become the first person in the U.S. in more than 40 years to be convicted of obscenity for her writings - six stories about children getting raped and tortured. Her dark tales maybe were sketches for "Law & Order," right? If only they'd been. Rather Fletcher published her fiction on her adult-only SM website, Red-rose-stories.com, shut down by the FBI in August 2005.

For almost three years Fletcher fought the charges -- which Columbia constitutional law professor Tim Wu calls "astonishing." Fletcher contends that her writing served in part to exorcise bad memories from her own childhood. But in May, she decided to plead guilty, likely sparing the 56-year-old a prison term. She had faced up to 30 years -- five for each story.

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"You see the same kinds of description oftentimes on the 11 o'clock news or in detective magazines or slasher films," Fletcher's attorney Lawrence Walter tells The Guide. "If the subject had been approached with more judgmental tone, I couldn't imagine the government going after it."

The result of a plea bargain, Fletcher's conviction will set no legal precedent. But it ups the pressure on Minnesotan Frank McCoy, who was indicted in June, 2007 in Athens, Georgia, on obscenity charges for his oeuvre of breezy, incest porn fiction, written over more than a dozen years. McCoy's stories and one novel, Her Father's Daughter, are still readily available in online erotic-fiction archives, even as the case against him proceeds.

On April 22 a Saskatoon court sentenced Simon Houston, 55, to 15 months in prison for made-up tales involving sex with girls, stories he posted in 2005 to a U.S. website. The writer deserved the harsh sentence, declared Judge Robert Laing, because he "remains unrepentant."

Canadian law recognizes little distinction between words and images. Nonetheless, prosecutors' one previous attempt to put a writer in jail under the the country's kiddie-porn statute failed, when a court ruled 2002 that Robin Sharpe's erotic stories had artistic merit. (In 2005, Parliament later changed the law to restrict the "artistic merit" defense.)

War is peace

Back in the U.S., another fillip to criminalization of verbal ex-pression came on May 19 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a bizarre 2003 federal porn "pandering" law. The provisions in question make it illegal to even hint around that something is a sexually explicit image of a minor -- no matter that the "something" is in fact a legal image, a ham sandwich, or nonexistent.

The relevant sections of the 2003 "PROTECT Act" cover anyone who "advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits" any "material or purported material" in a manner that "reflects the belief" or is "intended to cause another to believe" that what's being referred to is a fictional drawing or photo of a minor engaged in sexual conduct.

In April 2006, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta -- hardly a bastion of left-wing jurisprudence -- struck down the pandering law. The 11th Circuit decision quoted the high court's 2002 ruling in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition: "The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."

This time, a 7-to-2 majority changed its tune, citing the illegality of offers to buy and sell drugs.

A picture of Jesus with the caption "High School Jock Strokes His Hard-on" could trigger a prosecution under the pandering law -- which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison -- with a mandatory five-year minimum.

Urine trouble

Naughty words are dancing liking sugar plums in the minds of America's sex police. But they're not exactly crowding out the images dancing there, too.

In Tampa on June 6, Paul Little ("Max Hardcore") was convicted on 20 federal obscenity counts for selling five (straight) videos -- Golden Guzzlers 7 and Fists of Fury 4 among them -- showing fisting, watersports, and vomiting. He faces up to 50 years in prison when sentenced September 5.

On May 21 Loren Jay Adams, owner of Xxxhard2findvideos.com, was arrested in Indiana for violation of federal obscenity prohibitions. He had shipped (to what turned out to be a U.S. Postal inspector in West Virginia) second-hand videos depicting fisting and bestiality.

Text in the eyes of America's legal prudes may be sexier now than any time since the 1950s. Ironically, it's because words are seen through the magnifying glass of half a century of racy images.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com