NRC asks for reviewers for forthcoming Internet porn report

[Sampo Syreeni]

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 at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front