"I bet if the wives had gone along on this camping trip there would have been a bit more modesty and decorum exhibited by all concerned."

I agree: it's high time that the rules of modesty and decorum be extended to private family camping trips in the woods.

Perhaps once we're through with the war on terror, we can turn our satellites and other spying technology on our forests to make sure that no one's skinny dipping.

"How can we expect children to grow up into adults with dignity, self-esteem and modesty if we think it’s cute to photograph them in poses that destroy those attributes?"

You mention those three things as if they're some kind of holy trinity. If by modesty you mean true humility, an understanding of one's true self worth, I'm with you. But I rather suspect you just mean prudery, in which case I would direct you to the nearest Saudi Arabian embassy.

Running around naked with my three year-old sister and peeing around the fire with my dad's beer drinking best friend would have struck me as weird when I was eight. Should it be stopped by the force of government? Probably not. However, any critically thinking adult should be able to understand that not everyone would be cool with it. You asked for the ass-kicking when you took pictures of this behaviour and didn't ensure that the pics would only be seen by the families. Now, we all know you aren't very bright, you and your family faced embarrassment both personally and professionally, introduced your kids to sexual scrutiny and let us online readers take inventory of your, sorry, questionable traditions. All because you are dumb enough not to prevent these pictures to be introduced to any number of people you never met before. Yet, you blame an admittedly imperfect system setup to protect kids from a very real threat. You are very dumb.

ps: you are also a bad writer. For instance, this little gem: "But to be accused of using your own children for pornographic purposes or sexual exploitation bears a special taint because no matter how highly people think of you, they don't know you in your most intimate moments, which forever leaves you open to suspicion." Bricks make strong houses, but they are terrible sentences. Salon must be paying you by the word or labyrinthian excess--but I doubt you make your living writing. Between this clunky mess, the woman with dreadlocks who slaps her kid or the "Snakes on a plane" writer calling Lloyd Bentsen Lloyd Benson, I must complain that Salon reads like a Learning Annex school paper.

Can anyone recommend a left-leaning online mag that has intelligent writing?

I think that allowing oneself to get almost violently angry and depressed over a situation in which one has no control whatsoever over the outcome is insane.

Anyway, I have known many social service employees in my lifetime, and I know that most of them are really motivated by a desire to help people out, not to persecute the innocent. And, yes, I am sure that if I were investigated for child pornography, my true friends would stand by me-- my record is spotless, and I have raised two well adjusted and successful adults, and helped a few other children along as well, and people know me to be a compassionate and generous person. I have confidence in my self and in my friends, and, in fact, in most of the people in the United States. I refuse to live in paranoia and anger. Life is too short.

And all government and non-profit social work employees earn what many of you in the private sector would call barely a living wage, because, once again, this is so-called "women's work" that is "easy to do". Sadly, with the huge caseloads, and low pay, and constantly stressful work conditions (dealing with child abuse and seriously angry people who are being investigated) many of the best will burn out and seek other, higher paying employment after a few years.

Believe it or not, the world does not revolve around any one of us. Policing is required in order to maintain civilization, and we all have an obligation to cooperate with the police forces, up until the point where they actually violate our civil rights. This man put his photos through a public processing service, therefore he waived any right to privacy himself. What do you want?

I feel sorry for the author and his family for the nightmare experience they went through.

But I do agree that the dad showed remarkably poor judgment.

If my husband came back from a camping trip with photos of our kids playing with broken beer bottles (!), and a photo of them peeing with the kids (where was the daughter, watching the other dad pee as well?... did she take the picture?) I would read him the riot act about safety and what parts of adults bodies are appropriate for kids to see.

I took my son to the state university he’s going to attend recently for an orientation session. I hadn’t been on a college campus in decades. It was a wonderful facility, full of people dedicated to the proposition that my son, and a lot of other people’s children, are the future and well worth the effort to educate and mature. It was a terrific experience for a father about to push junior out of the nest. There were so many people ready to ease his transition. I thought back to the days when I first showed up at a similar institution; the bus just sort of dumped me at the curb and I damn well had to figure out what was what on my own. Obviously, some progress had been made in the intervening eons.

At one point, I was in an office and picked up a pen. On the side, it was labeled: “University of X, Department of Discrimination and Harassment.” At first, I thought, “How cool, they actually have an office with employees whose sole job is to protect kids from D & H." But I also thought about how an office with employees needs something to keep it busy, to justify its budget...and how an office of “Discrimination and Harassment” is at risk to attract a certain kind of employee: self-righteous, loaded up on PC terms and concepts, eager to root out evil even if the evil needs to be manufactured. This article is about just such a state of affairs, I believe. The DFCS, while they undoubtedly do good work and protect children in real ways, is obviously an agency that has attracted the wrong kind of employees and has, either explicitly or implicitly, sent them the message that “You’d better find plenty of evil out there, or our budget is going to suffer.” What a shame, but it’s really just human nature. I don't have a solution to propose.