The 5-year-old boy who chose to be Daphne from "Scooby-Doo" for Halloween.

And the mother who chose to blog about it.

So now there's a viral photo on the internet of a boy dressed as a girl and endless speculation about what that all means.

1. Did the mother invade her son's privacy? By blogging about the issue of a very young boy who wants to pretend to be a girl? Or was it the photograph? Or was it wrong even to invade the child's fantasy world by speculating about his sexual orientation? The mother's blog post was titled "My Son Is Gay." Do we owe children restraint in thinking about what sexual behavior they will find compelling when they grow up, and if we do, don't we all violate that duty in one way or another?

2. Consider the notion that a costume of a perfectly nice girl was perceived as an unusually scary Halloween character. Kids dress as devils and monsters and dead people all the time, but to be a pretty girl — if you are a boy — is terrifying. As the blogger noted, a girl dressed as a male character would not stir the same anxiety in the grownups. What does this say about sexism? Is there a special aversion to females, that manifests itself when a male associates with female things? Or is it that people have a special aversion to male homosexuals and are really pretty much okay with lesbians?

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

I'm glad I'm at home when I followed your "perfectly nice girl" link because some of those cartoons are definitely NSFW.

I've changed the link to the Wikipedia article on Daphne Blake. Previously, it went to the results of a Google image search on: Daphne Scooby Doo. I'll just add the "bestiality" tag to this post to indicate what you would have seen if you scanned the page too long.

"I like gays. I like all gays. And not just the ones who are Ann Coulter drag queens."

Said Ann Coulter in 2006, quoted today, by Mickey Kaus, who's defending her against the NYT, which has a big article on her saying she's "taking some surprising new positions" now that "the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder." One of the supposedly "surprising new positions" she's taken is pro-gay. Mickey says:

Coulter has a whole chapter in her [2007] book If Democrats Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans on why gays should join the GOP. The chapter is called "No Gays Left Behind!"... Pretty shrewd of her to realize in 2007 that in two years the Tea Parties would rise up and steal her "thunder"—so she'd better start going for the gays!

Ha ha.

"I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Comments?

ADDED: Bainbridge asks some questions that indicate that he finds this rather funny. I don't. But I have to agree with some of these questions:

Who stashes their porn on the internet? Other than porn stars?

Kozinski long has been regarded as one of the smartest guys on the federal bench. Do we need to rethink that?

IN THE COMMENTS: Simon says:

One would think that so notoriously tech-savvy a judge would be more conversant with the technology - and more careful.

One could deduce that he wanted to be caught ... or got a thrill from risking getting caught. You know, it might be tiresome for a certain sort of person to be a judge. There you are, for life. Well set up, but restricted, restrained, forced to be sober — forbidden to be fully expressive. Oddly, I had a conversation with Alex Kozinski about exactly this subject 20 years ago. Kozinski was only 35 years old when he was appointed, and that was 23 years ago.

ADDED: Patterico says he has the images referred to in the linked article, obtained from the L.A. Times reporter. If you go here, you will be able to read detailed descriptions and click on links to see the images. I clicked on all the links except the one that would have required watching a video. I wonder why the L.A. Times published this article. Why humiliate this man? (I am reminded of this story of unnecessary humiliation from a couple months ago.) What made it news? Is the porn collection of every public figure newsworthy? Or is it special treatment for conservative judges? (I'm thinking of this precedent.)

These are pictures of naked people, all of them funny or interesting in some way, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to look at them and to show them to other adults. The photograph of the women painted as cows is just silly — nothing to be horrified by. Yes, you can see genitalia in these pictures. It's extremely common to want to look at genitalia. It doesn't do anything for me, but I understand the strong interest many men have in such views — repetitive and predictable though they are. (The transvestite slide show is a little unpredictable, but within an utterly predictable range.)

Now, it should be noted that Kozinski is currently serving as the trial judge in an obscenity case, so there is a special motivation here. One might object to the prosecution of Ira Isaacs. Maybe the government shouldn't be prosecuting such cases, and one might think that it is hypocritical or at least relevant that the judge in the case has his own pornography. I think that is absurd. The judge doesn't make the decision to prosecute, and the sort of material at issue in an obscenity case is quite extreme — far beyond the sort of pictures that we ought to assume many judges and jurors possess.

[Kozinski's] involvement in the case may be a stroke of luck for Isaacs. That is because Kozinski is seen as a staunch defender of free speech. When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court's Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed....

Isaacs said he would testify as his own expert witness at trial and planned to lecture jurors on how perceptions of art have changed over the years. There was a time, he said, when the works of authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence were called obscene.

The point, Isaacs said, "is do we really want to throw artists in jail in America?"...

[The Obscenity Prosecution Task Force] has won convictions in more than a dozen cases, the vast majority resulting from plea bargains....

[Isaacs] said that prosecutors have made several overtures inviting him to take a plea in the case, but that he has refused every time....

"If I get convicted and go to prison now," Isaacs said, "I go as an artist."

I'd like to know what set of events led to the L.A. Times article.

Does the prosecution or the defense have more to gain from the revelation?

AND: The NYT offers more background:

In a telephone interview on Wednesday afternoon, Judge Kozinski ... said the Web site was meant to be private and that several people had contributed to it. “There is a ton of stuff on there,” Judge Kozinski said. “It’s not a porn site. There’s some funny stuff on there.”

Judge Kozinski said his son, Yale, maintained the site, which had the domain name of kozinski.com. Yale Kozinski, a film editor, confirmed that, as do Internet registry records for the site.

“This server is my private Web server,” Yale Kozinski said. “It’s owned by me. The domain is registered to me. The people who have access to put files up there are friends and family.” Among other things, he said, the site contained family photos and a collection of the judge’s articles.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Judge Kozinski had conceded posting some of the offensive materials. In interviews on Wednesday, neither Judge Kozinski nor his son could say who posted what, and Judge Kozinski said he might have uploaded some materials by mistake.

The site was never meant to be public, Yale Kozinski said. “The fact that it was publicly accessible actually is my fault, too,” he said. “I made a mistake in configuring it.”

Judge Kozinski said he was only moderately contrite.

“I guess I should be more careful about access and all,” he said. “I didn’t put anything on there I think would be embarrassing.”

Oh, well, if he doesn't think it's embarrassing, then maybe I shouldn't be critical of the press for publicly humiliating him.

UPDATE: How Appealing has info on the tipster, Cyrus Sanai, who emails (boldface added):

I discovered this information on Xmas Eve, 2007. * * * * I immediately downloaded so much material that his internet provider cut him off. When the site went back up, Judge Kozinski had removed some of the biggest video files. * * * * I pitched it to the Daily Journal, the Recorder, the LA Times and the WSJ through end of January 2008. I was interested in his site because of my renewed misconduct complaint against Judge Kozinski...

The LA Times reporter I contacted, Henry Weinstein (who extensively covered the Manuel Real stuff) said he would get to it, then he took the buyout. I contacted Scott Glover, the reporter on the obscenity trial, last Sunday, June 8, 2008. He knew nothing about my prior contact with the LA Times; but that institution is in disarray because of the well-covered restructuring. Therefore, it would not be fair to say that the LA Times "held it". The institutional knowledge of my prior contact disappeared * * * *

The NY Sun has this:

The judge's trouble with Mr. Sanai began in 2005, when the attorney wrote an article with examples of 9th Circuit judges allegedly ignoring circuit precedents. Judge Kozinski wrote a rebuttal that noted Mr. Sanai's personal stake in one of the disputed issues. The attorney, who had a motion pending in that case, filed a complaint alleging that the judge broke rules barring judges from commenting or lobbying on pending cases. The complaint was dismissed, but Mr. Sanai refiled it after the judge re-posted the article on the same site with the explicit photos.

Here's some analysis of the L.A. Times's journalism standards, from the Carnegie Reporting Program:

The key question is whether it would have been a story if Kozinski weren't presiding over an obscenity trial at the time...

I say yes. Kozinski is a high-ranking judge whose court hears more obscenity cases than the current one. Controversy over the line between erotica and obscenity is legal news, and Kozinski's misfortune provides a teaching moment to explore the current state of the law. Kozinski has a track record as a critic of government intrusion into personal use of the Internet. Publishing a story without the trial as a news hook would be extremely uncomfortable, but I would have green-lighted it and placed the revelations in the context of Kozinski's disputes with Sanai and over Internet use. As for the Times, there should be no question that it did the right thing under the circumstances.

AND: I got some of those links from Above the Law, which has lots of good discussion in the comments.

Here's where I pick out all my favorite quotes from the things I've collected on this blog over the past year.

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Joe Biden on Barack Obama.

"And to say that we are going to feed more American young men and women into that grinder, put them in the middle of a tribal, sectarian civil war, is not going to fix the problem...." Chuck Hagel, sure the surge would fail.

"I am self-involved, mercurial and comfortable eating dinners of frozen waffles in my underpants."

"Is Coulter truly oblivious to her gender weirdness? It's no coincidence that words like 'tranny' and transvestite' clog the anti-Coulter blogs." Camille Paglia, getting ugly.

"I'm pretty much going to stay out of it until the course — the case has finally run its final — the course it's going to take." President Bush, declining to say if he'll pardon Scooter Libby.

"Since the slaughter raised no real issues, it was a blank slate on which anyone could doodle." Christopher Hitchens on the Virginia Tech Massacre.

''He still didn't put the butter up... I was like, 'You're just asking for it, you know I'm giving a speech. Why don't you just put the butter up?''' Michelle Obama.

"An aging roué, who is almost too facile, and a grimly ambitious feminist lawyer, with a tough but conventional mind." Noemie Emery -- in The Weekly Standard -- on Bill and Hillary Clinton.

"We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people."

"We like the United States of America, but we do not like your Waschbaeren!"

"I suggest to you with respect, Your Honor, that you're a few French Fries short of a Happy Meal..."

"If you don't like your life, change it." Something simple but profound that Laurence Olivier once said, noted on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

"Maybe his solution will be to get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn." Something hilarious John McCain said about Mitt Romney.

"I will follow him to the gates of hell." "You sure wouldn't want to be where Saddam Hussein is, where we helped put him." Hell talk from John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.

"Teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed." Justice Clarence Thomas.

"I believe that Ann intentionally keeps her camera focused on the books behind her... so that she is filmed in a flattering soft focus." Some ADS sufferer on Bloggingheads.

"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Justice Antonin Scalia.

"Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ’permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee." Winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

"I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially..." Young Hillary Clinton.

"Clinton's low-cut shirt simply reflected a few centimeters of sartorial miscalculation..." Robin Givhan.

"He quickly matched my urgency in the clothes-removal efforts and we were naked and happy in no time." Al Gore's daughter writes a novel.

"We are 45 doctors and we are determined to undertake jihad and take the battle inside America."

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear." Mother Theresa.

"I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate...."

"He knows enough to know he's not descended from apes!"

"So here’s the rule. You never repeat right wing talking points to attack your own, ever. You never enter that echo chamber as a participant. Ever. You never give them a hammer to beat the left with. Just. Don’t. Do. It." Jane Hamsher tells Elizabeth Edwards what to do.

"What politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply." A quote from it's-easy-to-guess-who that I wrote 10 questions about.

"He's typing and drinking and threatening to 'shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.'" Maureen Dowd, describing Stephen Colbert as he's writing a guest column for her.

"Si te gusta el sexo oral, vote por Caragol por consejal." My favorite foreign language quote of the year.

"And another thing - the crotch, down where your nuts hang - is always a little too tight, so when you make them up, give me an inch that I can let out there, uh because they cut me, it's just like riding a wire fence. These are almost, these are the best I've had anywhere in the United States. But, uh when I gain a little weight they cut me under there. So, leave me , you never do have much of margin there. See if you can't leave me an inch from where the zipper (burps) ends, round, under my, back to my bunghole, so I can let it out there if I need to." LBJ, ordering pants.

"The rage he harbors raises questions about whether he can sit as an impartial judge in many of the cases the Supreme Court hears." New York Times editorial about Clarence Thomas.

"It strikes me as a self-hurt book." Jon Stewart on Chris Matthews' self-help book.

"Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?" Bob Dylan.

"I knew this was no fetish-laden intrigue with a woman of another race, but a gift from God." Clarence Thomas, on meeting his second wife.

"I'd done what I thought was right, and I took heart from George Benson: I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows/If I fail, if I succeed/At least I live as I believe/No matter what they take from me/They can't take away my dignity." Clarence Thomas, steeling himself by listening, over and over, to "The Greatest Love of All."

"What I wanted was for everyone — the government, the racists, the activists, the students, even Daddy — to leave me alone so that I could finally start thinking for myself." Clarence Thomas describing how he felt after reading Ayn Rand.

"He insisted that we bathe in what he called a 'teaspoon' of water, using laundry detergent instead of soap. 'Waste not, want not,' he repeatedly warned us. We weren't allowed to use towels to dry ourselves, either, since Daddy thought washcloths were good enough to get us dry (as well as being easier to launder than towels). Whenever he thought we hadn't gotten ourselves clean enough, he finished the job himself, a terrifying experience that we did everything we could to avoid." Clarence Thomas, on the baths of childhood.

"Sen. Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn't work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it." Barack Obama.

"And I would never spend my money on a Chinese girl skeleton. That would be crossing the line. It's a Chinese boy, for the record." Marilyn Manson.

"Maybe yellow blotches, wrinkles, and phantom fetuses really get a pubescent neotenic mole salamander in the mood for love." Go Fug Yourself.

"At the moment, Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque." David Brooks.

"I did shift from being against the death penalty to thinking that if it has a significant deterrent effect it’s probably justified." Cass Sunstein.

"Blogs are walking up to legal scholarship and slapping it in the face. Blogs say to legal scholarship: 'How dare you! Evolve or Die!'" From the Bloggership Symposium.

"If you don't pass universal health care by July of 2009... I'm going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you." John Edwards, megalomaniacally.

"It's basically akin to someone sitting on their couch and chewing up food and spitting it all over the floor and the walls and the furniture month after month until it piles up and congeals and grows into mold, turning the room into a repulsive, health-threatening mess." Bad Simile of the Year, from Glenn Greenwald.

"Oh gee, I can't figure out what I think. Don't pick on me by asking that question! That's a gotcha question!" Rudy Giuliani spoofs Hillary Clinton.

"Everything I'm saying here is my wife's position, not just mine." Bill Clinton, remembering to talk not only about himself.

"I'm not doin' hand shows today." Fred Thompson.

"Well, Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well."

"WHAT DI DHE DO AFORE HOW LONG AND WITH WHO ?? PLS TELL BOB HELLO BOB."