On Wed, 15 Aug 2001 georgemw@speakeasy.net wrote:
On 16 Aug 2001, at 0:09, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
And I think if you look at the history of the Bill of Rights (which Americans naturally know far better than I ever will), one does have some reason to believe the "speech" in 1A is mostly targeted at political speech, even if the meaning is implied.
I really don't think so. It's possible some people were more concerned with political speech in the sense that the idea that Congress might try to ban "dirty books" wouldn't have ocurred to them in the first place, whereas the idea that it might try to ban "subversive" or "heretical" speech seemed a more likely threat, but the idea that political speech is somehow more deserving of protection (as opposed to more in need) would have been as alien to the founding fathers as it is to me.
I'll take that a step further; the only people who will assert that political speech is somehow more important than any other kind are people who have spent too much of their lives heavily involved in politics.
I think the same concept is true for the BoR in general. The 4th amendment prohibition against unreasonable serach and seizure isn't there to give criiminals (political or otherwise) a sporting chance, it's that your life is essentially your own, and if society wants to invade your home they'd better have a damn good reason.
The reason there isn't an amendment in the BoR protecting your right to eat, drink, and smoke what you choose is that the glutinous pothead drunkards who wrote the Constitution never conceived of such abusive laws in the first place, which in turn is because the bush-league tyrant George III never even considered trying to inflict such laws on the populace.
(The landmark Supreme Court cases on obscenity, like Miller, have to do with fairly gross obscenity. Not that I agree they were justified, but the "online decency" issue is a long way from what the Supremes have said may be banned.)
So how about the "prevailing community standard" part?
Well, that's just something the Supremes made up, but, to be fair, the idea that the 14th extends the protection of most but not quite all of the BoR from Congress to the states is more or less something the Supremes made up also.
"For the children!" is no more a reason to trump the First for Web sites than it would be to trump the First for bookstores, for example, by requiring that "Lolita" be kept in an adult's only section.
The question is, are there enough sensible people around to stop precisely that from happening?
How many does it take? I suspect the vast majority don't care much one way or the other. They don't read, they don't care what or if other people read, hell, I haven't even read Lolita myself, saw the Kubrik film though.
Nor is "self labelling" acceptable under the First. My words are my words, my pages are my pages. I don't have to "rate" them for how a Muslim might feel about them, or how Donna Rice might react, or whether I included material "offensive" to Creationists.
Agreed. But I do think self-labelling is a nice gesture, and may even afford one a direct means of targeting a site specifically for the kind of people most vocal about banning online speech.
Self-label if you choose. But don't be too surprised when others choose otherwise. More to the point, don't be too surprised when others self label and rate their content in a way radically different to the way you would.
George
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front