Once again, our Supreme Court overlords ... I mean, justices… have decided that the First Amendment trumps all other concerns. They have struck down the Child Online Protection Act, which sought to keep kids away from porn. Now, if those porn sites included Christian prayer, smoking, or people brandishing guns, that would be something different.
In fact, it appears that the only kind of “speech” (are dirty pictures really “speech”) that cannot be regulated is porn. Everything else, including the kind of speech that the Founding Fathers were really trying to protect—political speech—is no longer free.
It’s interesting to consider that at some point pictures and movies were determined to be speech. Certainly the Founding Fathers couldn’t have had those in mind when they created the First Amendment, right? All part of viewing the Constitution as a “living document,” i.e. malleable to suit whatever they feel it is today.
We are the porno country of the world now, and our Supreme Court has ensured that every means will be used to expose our children to porn – including in libraries and in our homes. The concept of free speech has been perverted by the courts to mean, not that anyone can sell porn, but that pornographers must have access to the net and to our libraries. This is a sickness which is badly affecting our children, 1/2 of all whom are not shielded from internet porn. This is part and parcel of the depravization of our society. – And Anthony Kennedy is a porn lover – recently having written the case that allows for the production of virtual child porn in our country. We live in a sick, sick country.
Once upon a time I adhered to very libertine views on these sorts of things and promoted such topics as freedom of the press and freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and so forth. However, most of my arguments for the more libertarian of those views could not withstand even simple analysis of the practical effects of those policies applied in reality. Truly, “by their fruits you shall know them” was a guiding maxim that would have saved me a couple years of wasted effort trying to defend such approaches.
Somehow, I had misinterpreted God’s gift of free will to man as being the end of His gifts, and not the beginning. A catechist started me down the path of proper analysis of free will with the statement, “True freedom is freedom from sin.” And, a notable theologian priest commented, “Freedom properly exercised is freedom to do good. It is not simply license.”
So, in light of all these “benefits” that the Supreme Court keeps giving American society with respect to free speech, I have to ask: Are we really better off with codified “freedom of speech” in our constitution where legitimate censorship is subject to the ever-changing legal interpretation of a majority of nine justices? Or, in the grand scheme of things, should we just scrap explicit freedom of speech and its now-attendant abuses for the world of licensing and government permission to cram your disgusting culture down somebody else’s throat?
Were things that worse off with the Index? Can somebody show how so-called “freedom of expression” suffered under the former system to the detriment of society?
I have been heavily involved with internet research for the past ten years, and I have to admit that while blogs such as these and google and web pages are nice, I sincerely fear for the uninitiated who are at the whim of wherever the search engine lands them. Without guidance and training and proper formation, it is far too easy to be misled.
Perhaps freedom of speech has led us down a similar path.
Hey pel –
Yeah… True freedom is the freedom to do good. Which is why a Mother Theresa was so much more truly free in her life than is the man who is consumed (and enslaved) by internet porn.
As per The Book of 2 Peter …a man is a slave to that which masters him…
With the increasing pornographication of our country, we are enslaving millions of souls (and often very young ones).
Our Supreme Court long ago left the moral plane, and has embraced all sorts of varied and horrific evils…
We are ruled by those who believe that ‘freedom’ is the freedom of our base desires, and the freedom from God and His love.
We live in a very sick country. We are, in many ways, becoming the embodiment of the Brave New World. This Supreme Court ruling is part and parcel of that.