[Ken H]

The First Amendment existed to protect POLITICAL speech — words, first and foremost. In origin it did not mean to protect "arts" such as dancing, nor would most Founders have ever agreed that it protected lewdness.

James Madison on the First Amendment and licentiousness of the press:

Is, then, the Federal Government, it will be asked, destitute of every authority for restraining the licentiousness of the press, and for shielding itself against the libellous attacks which may be made on those who administer it?

The Constitution alone can answer this question. If no such power be expressly delegated, and if it be not both necessary and proper to carry into execution an express power--above all, if it be expressly forbidden, by a declaratory amendment to the Constitution--the answer must be, that the Federal Government is destitute of all such authority.

James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions

Jan. 1800 Writings 6:385--401

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_speechs24.html

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LICEN''TIOUSNESS, n. Excessive indulgence of liberty; contempt of the just restraints of law, morality and decorum.

http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster%27s&word=licentiousness&use1828=on (Webster's 1828 edition)

[bvw]

Madison did not say "general licentiousness", instead he said "licentiousness of the the press". The First Amendment says forbids Congress from making a law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble".

The press means words and images, more specifically words and images able to be copied easily by means of a printing press.

Madison did not then speak of licentiousness in private or public speech, only in that media which was easily copied and distributed. Moreover he did not mean lewdness in that casting of phrase, given the context and era that he meant carelessness, reckless carelessness of the sort that creates or invites a public hazard or danger. "Without license." Bouvier's 1856 Law Dictionary defines licentiousness as follows:

LICENTIOUSNESS. The doing what one pleases without regard to the rights of others; it differs from liberty in this, that the latter is restrained by natural or positive law, and consists in doing whatever we please, not inconsistent, with the rights of others, whereas the former does not respect those rights. Wolff, Inst. §84.

That is, not lewdness, just rudeness.

In Madison's time lewd behavior was a criminal behavior covered under a number of common law principles and statutes in various jurisdictions.

You appear to be relying on the adaptations of history -- rewritten history, that is -- developed in the later part of the twentieth century by Marxist social deconstructionist in order to debase the culture by criminalizing moral sanity. A debased cultural, full of moral confusion, is the turbulence needed to fuel a Marxist Revolution.

And indeed, they were right. Here we are today in the midst of one.