Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Swine Flu Casualty (sort of): Free Speech



Well, there seems to be a casualty of the swine flu today...attention to the Supreme Court's outrageous ruling that the FCC will be allowed to fine broadcasters for airing any "fleeting expletives." These are single-word curses like "fuck" and "shit" - or perhaps references that should be thrown around a lot in any documentary about the kinds of people (Parents Television Council) who are celebrating this ruling: "assholes." But while the news headlines have been dominated by the "all swine flu all the time headlines" (and yeah, not an unimportant story), the Supreme Court allowing the FCC to trample all over the First Amendment has fallen off the media's radar today.

For some excellent thoughts on this, do check on the right of this blog for Paul Levinson's piece too. As he argues - and has been arguing for years - it's outrageous how the words as clear as "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" can be allowed to be flouted by an irrelevant and reactionary bureaucracy like the FCC.

And Dr. Levinson is absolutely right in the argument that conservative justices are ignoring their own beliefs that a judge should not legislate from the bench. This is an exact point I have believed in for a very long time, every time I heard the conservative far right wing moralists supporting censorious legislation. What the hell happened to the party of "small government" and Ronald Reagan's goal to "get government off your back?" What happened to the American people knowing how to live their lives and raise their families better than Washington bureaucrats and censorious, puritanical, whacko special interests?

Perhaps this might be one of the reasons so many are deserting that party for a real limited-government-alternative like the Libertarian Party.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

I Seek Britney



Being away from a regular dose of entertainment gossip, I almost lost track of a great Britney Spears story…then almost missed a piece summarizing a pornography study on the FOXSexpert column. The timing of these stories is just perfect and I wanted to comment on them as a follow-up on my previous post praising the timely and thankful rejection of an absurd anti-porn law by the Supreme Court.

Although we’re in the twenty first century, I still feel the urge to scan the headlines every few days in case there might be the public burning of a witch. Or maybe the red-lettering of an adulteress. Today I just got my almost-missed story of something equally as stupid: the brain trust of the Parents Television Council is threatening to file obscenity complaints against radio stations playing Britney Spears’ song “If You Seek Amy.” Now I’ll have my school radio station to play it completely uncut, I think.

Their reasoning is explained here, on their web page. Some delicate, impressionable young child might accidentally be exposed to it while listening to the radio. The horrors of playing a silly double-entendre that most junior high school kids would be embarrassed to say! Most would be embarrassed because it’s so tame and silly, in fact, that other kids might laugh at their lack of sophistication in matters of sex. I know when I was in junior high, or grade school for that matter, that’s probably what would have happened to you. “If You Seek Amy? Come on, you can do better than that!”

Now would I really would urge anyone to check out the Sexpert article’s summary of a study on teen attitudes on pornography. It is brief, it summarizes the study well, and it’s clear enough with its numbered points for even a member of the Parents Television Council to understand. Or maybe they might want to invest time in a second reading. But the point is that if this is how teens react to pornography, it really is an absurd waste of time to listen to the PTC’s harping about the pernicious threat Britney Spears poses for America’s impressionable, innocent young children.

The study is a remarkable outline of what active and critical consumers teens are of pornography. Far from being stupid, mindless, thoughtless sponges that see images in the media and imitate them, teens process information from even the hardest, most explicit pornography “critically, (compare) it to life experiences and information from other sources. Young people are able to evaluate the materials as overstated, distorted or incorrect. The ultimate reaction: They tune out or distance themselves from the source.”

Furthermore, “hardly any of the participants (in the study) considered the pornography actors as celebrities, but rather as ‘cheap’ and ‘ridiculous.’”

Kids, or adults or any of those audience members in whose name the meddling do-gooders of the PTC usually advocate censorship are not as passive, weak, and pliant as the PTC usually argues.

This should be something to think about for all those admiring the PTC for their efforts to protect America’s families: These people think you are stupid, you can’t run your own family or raise your children, and you need the hand of big government bureaucracies to tell you how to live.

So just relax and let the kids listen to Britney!

Regards,
Barna W. Donovan, Ph.D.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Good Riddance to Child Online Protection Act

This Wednesday the Supreme Court decided the Child Online Protection Act will definitely not be revived. You can check out the story here.

This was a law attempting to censor the internet, keeping sexually explicit content away from kids.

It is nice to see the Supreme Court make this decision at the same time we're hearing about the Chinse government cracking down on sexually explicit material available to its citizens over the internet. It's great to see exactly what the contrast is between free societies and dictatorships.

Especially since there isn't a single study offering a single shred of empirical evidence proving that pornography will change children in any way (at least no study that an undergraduate half way through any introductory research class could not tear to shreds, stomp all over, and humiliate), it's great to see nonsense like the Child Online Protection act get thrown right on top of the legal trash heap where it belongs.

I'm kind of looking forward to the reading the reactions of sanctimonious would-be censors like the Parents Television Council.