This thing about censorship reminds me of the American comicbook industry.  In my youthful days, they were publishing titles under what was dubbed “the Comics Code Authority”.  The Code came into being after the mid 1950s because Dr Frederick Wortham came along from some university and made such a big production of his theory that comicbooks turned little boys into murderers and rapists that the Congress held hearings into which most of the comicbook publishers found themselves being dragged.  Sufficiently bullied into fearing the long arm of a government agency out to jail them for “corrupting” the young, they adopted the Code as a self-censoring aparatus which, amongst other things, meant that the words “murder”, “zombie”, and “terror” couldn’t be printed, nor any of the subjects be explicitly illustrated in their panels.

   Now, mind you, there were some examples of pictures which pushed the envelope pretty far just prior to the Code being put into force, and some of the worst “offenders” were gritty crime and horror comics.  Only after the late 1960s did some of the Code’s more stringent prohibitions get lifted, and not without some resistance.  However, it seems nonexistent now.

   Today, it looks like we’re back to where it was when Dr Wortham got his crusade started.  So, if they’re going to be all over us for using bulls-eyes and crosshairs as symbols in political ads (all for the sake of the children on no account due to dangerous psychotics like Jared Loghner, of course), will we be seeing a “no blood or guts in comics” crusade next?  Methinks the next Frederick Wortham must be waiting in the wings.

   The big difference now would be that this one might be a Leftist loon with a thing for looking the other way if someone’s character is shown performing a deviant sexual act (slightly off-panel), just so long as the villain is a conservative “Sarah Palin” stand-in.