On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
However, in a free society with protections similar to the First Amendment, what people like or dislike is not germane to what government may pass laws about. There is nothing in the First which allows government to regulate speech or music or any other such form of expression based on its offensiveness to some. Nothing.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm the first to agree that porn *should* be treated as equal to other speech, but considering the strength of the opposite view nowadays, I would not be surprised if the First was gutted in this regard. 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.
(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?
"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?
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. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front