OK, perhaps I was being unfair. I've enountered more than a few people who speak with certainty about how the Constitution works who have clearly never read it. I'll assume for the sake of argument that you are not one of them.
It is true that the constitution can be amended, but it is a far more difficult process to amend the constitution than it is for some city to pass an ordinance.
Correct, but at least one time in American history, the Constitution was amended to ban something that was considered harmful to men and society -- alcohol. If alcohol can be banned by amendment, so can pornography if the will and numbers are there. And here is the point. Doing so would be entirely Constitutional.
But people don't ignore my other point. Do you really think that the Founding Fathers who wrote the 1st Amendment intended it to protect obscene material like, say, bestiality pictures (to keep this from getting to abstract)? Do you think the drafters of the 14th Amendment had that intent?
BTW, none of the bill of rights applied to the states, not just the 1st. Only via the 14th were they incorporated and then only selectively.
Correct. So at the time it was passed, and for nearly 100 years, that amendment was not the absolute protection of free speech that people claim it is today, yet the Republic endured, didn't it?
As for "selectively", that's part of the problem, isn't it? What's the rational and objective basis for deciding that child pornography and, maybe, bestiality are far game for prosecution but other pornography isn't? I mean once you step on that slippery slope, is it really possible to make a distinction that doesn't slide you one way or the other?
The republic survived for 100 years with slavery being legal as well. Even longer with women not having the right to vote. Societal norms change. Does anyone think that dogfighting would have warranted a federal indictment in 1790?
I don't think the founding fathers envisioned the telephone either, but that doesn't mean that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to the government eavesdropping.