I guess I'm naive. I have a few issues here with the parent's behavior.

1) Wow, a 13-year old kid is looking at porn. Stop the presses!

2) Gay porn or not, why should the parent care? Would it be OK if it were hetero porn?

3) Checking out the son's web log to see what sites the son has been visiting? Really fostering an atmosphere of trust, eh? Letting the kid develop self-confidence?

What I see is a paranoid parent invading his son's privacy. I suggest getting a hobby and letting the son know he can talk to you about anything at any time, and leaving it at that.

The subtext here is that the possibility of homosexuality might demand parental intervention where it would not be necessary if the son had the good taste to be watching Paris Hilton videos. We may well have yet another case of a parent finding out, much to his dismay, that his son's sexual orientation is not something under his control.

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I think Salon and more established "media outlets" are trying their hardest to draw a line between their own paid reporters and citizen "journalists" like Josh Wolf. If the only issue here were who had the standing as a "journalist", I think Wolf would be on solid legal ground. There is no certification process for journalism, and there is no reason to say that anybody, anywhere, publishing anything wouldn't qualify as a "journalist".

And that's why journalists shouldn't have the right to resist subpoenas based on their profession. Indeed, as others have pointed out, there is no Constitutional right to protect sources. That's why journalists keep going to jail when they try to invoke a right that doesn't exist.

The only reason that people think this is a First Amendment issue is because journalists are the ones reporting on their own legal status.

Whether there should be a Federal "shield law" or not is another issue. Personally, I don't think that it's a workable concept. If there were such a law, then we would be tied up in the absurd practice of having the government decide who qualifies as a journalist and who doesn't. How does one get to sign up for this job that allows one to blithely ignore subpeonas?

I wager that, if such a law were passed, untold numbers of political operatives would suddenly declare themselves to be "journalists". Heck, the RNC would publish a "journal" and then declare all of their internal emails to be protected.

I don't see this as a desirable outcome. Given that in recent years, so-called "journalistic privilege" has been invoked to justify the actions of a war propagandeer, perhaps we ought to take a long, hard look at exactly what this idea is supposed to protect. Right now it seems like there is far too much secrecy in society, and creating a new "right" to resist subpoenas hardly seems desirable.