From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

You can’t blame Karen Fletcher for deciding not to fight.

Had she lost, she faced the possibility of five years in prison. Under the plea agreement she accepted in early August, she got six months of house arrest, five years on probation and a $1,000 fine. But if the agreement allows Fletcher, of Donora, Pa., to avoid the more onerous punishment, it also allows us to avoid what surely would have been a violent collision between morality and the Constitution.

Karen Fletcher is a pornographer. And not just any old pornographer: The 56-year-old woman specializes in the rape, torture and murder of children. Indeed, children as young as infancy.

Here’s the twist: no children were hurt by — or even involved with — Fletcher’s pornography. She was prosecuted under federal obscenity statutes for writing “fiction” depicting the violent abuse of children. Fletcher has said the stories were her way of coping with sexual abuse she suffered as a child, a claim somewhat undercut by the fact that she was profiting from her work to the tune of 30 subscribers paying $10 a month to read the stories on her Web site.

All of which leaves me feeling … irresolute. On the one hand, you have a woman doing a repellent thing with no discernible social value. By all available evidence, Fletcher’s imagination is a garbage barge ripening under the sun. The world of arts and letters — the world, period — is not diminished by the loss of her work.

On the other hand, you have a writer prosecuted — in America! — for something she wrote. That demands a ruminative pause if not, indeed, a full stop.

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