From: IN%"tcmay@got.net" 9-MAR-1996 21:00:29.15

I plan to taper off on all responses to this thread about SurfWatch and ratings services. Various sides have expressed their opinions about what courts and governments will demand, and others respond by saying, "I disagree. They can pass a law..." or "I disagree. The government is powerless," etc.

I can see your reasons for doing so. The discussion of how to use ratings systems in ways not intended, so long as the government isn't able to get in the way of doing so, is probably more interesting.

In the terms of the lawyers--from what I picked up during my time on the Cyberial list--a requirement that words be rated before they can be distributed would not pass Constitutional muster. This does not mean that one's words will not trigger prosecutions, lawsuits, treason trials, etc. What it means is that "prior restraint" is frowned upon (recall "The Progressive" H-bomb case of about 15 years ago, where a court subjected this magazine to prior restraint...a rare occurrence, later overturned. A more recent case involves "Business Week," and is still unresolved).

I may check with a lawyer myself on this issue. I had known that prior restraint, as in restraining something from being published at all, was considered unconstitutional by all but the nut-case authoritarians. But I had thought that the question of rating was still up in the air - the TV industry seems to have decided not to fight the V-chip in court, for instance. Since the government seems to have decided that it can remove "indecent" material, as judged by them, from the purview of minors, it could argue that a mandated rating system is the "least restrictive" way to do so - ignoring that others can use it for further restrictions.

By the way, who does the rating in this scenario? As others have also noted, if I am rating my own pages, and rate them as "suitable for all ages," but Jesse Helms disagrees, what charges can be filed? That I was not a good enough judge of the material? That my opinions differed from Senator Helms'?

Well, I and Senator Helms have differing views on what is "obscene" and what isn't - and a court is more likely to go with his (prevailing community norms and all that nonsense) in deciding whether to prosecute me.

"Voluntary self-rating" runs into problems, such as this example. One is left with ratings by _others_, e.g.. ratings boards, and even then there are variations of this same problem. The "Lesbian Alliance" is going to have different ideas of what children should be exposed to than the "Christian Crusade" will ideas about. Who is right? ("What is truth?")

There's also the lawsuit issue. If somebody decides that I haven't rated my words high enough to keep "indecent" material from their children, they may sue - and "community norms" will be used to decide.

...

D. The government in a country such as China uses rating systems to help them filter.

Doesn't have much to do with _my_ words or pages. It ain't the business of the U.S. court system--which is what we're talking about here--to worry about what some Maoists think is proper for young cadres to read.

I was discussing what was ethical for the proponents of rating systems to do, not what they should be _allowed_ to do. In other words, I am in favor of allowing anyone who wishes to create a rating system, just as I am in favor of allowing anyone who wishes to talk a bunch of utter trash about Holocaust Revisionism. But I wish to discourage people from doing either (or at least in the first case from creating systems that can be misused in such an obvious fashion).

I disagree with the overall conclusions of this line of reasoning. (Though the "children are not the property of their parents" point is heavy phrasing, and hard to take issue with directly, due to the language.)

I use it as the anarcho-capitalists do who claim that taxation is theft. It gets the attention. I am angered by modern trends in favor of _either_ parental (parents deciding their kids shouldn't learn about evolution, or about sex) or societal (curfews et al). I am also angered by cases like the Joey Buttafuocco (sp?) one, in which he was convicted for having sex with a (definitely willing) minor who was decided to be sufficiently competent to be tried as an adult for committing murder. I had a set of decidedly overprotective parents myself, and I can trace lots of psychological damage from that. They did it out of love, but sometimes that just doesn't work.

In any case, while children are not for their parents to do with as they please, a reasonable Schelling point has been that I will not force other parents to expose their children to the teachings of Cthulhu if they will not demand that my children sit through propaganda tapes about the joys of homosexual sex. The status of children in a free society is a thorny issue, but I reject the increasingly-prevalent notion that society knows what's best and the government will decide what influences can be used with children. A society which takes away this parental choice is a terrible society.

I tend to conclude that neither parents nor "society" should have any more reign over their children than absolutely necessary. Parents have certain rights over their children which derive from their responsibilities over those children - i.e., to keep those children safe, get them educated so they can have freedoms like speech and press, et al. If the parent can't clearly show that the intervention into the child's life isn't necessary for that responsibility to be fulfilled, then the parent shouldn't be able to do that intervention any more than I should be able to claim that the CO2 being put out by a factory is harming me, and should be stopped, without a lot of evidence otherwise.

I see much of the debate about violence and sex in society and in the media as being this kind of "battle for the hearts and minds" of children. I don't want some sociologist telling me that "Terminator II" is "bad" for my child but that "The Story of O" should be mandatory for my 11-year-old to watch.

I agree about the "mandatory" part; I simply want to make it an option for that child - not an option for the parent. -Allen