Posted on 07/05/2011 1:50:26 PM PDT by Kaslin
The U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong in Brown v. Entertainment Merchant Association. This wasn't a First Amendment case, it was a parents' rights case -- and only Justice Clarence Thomas understood that.
The issue was a California law that would prohibit the $60 billion-a-year video game industry from selling hideously violent games to children without parental consent. Numerous other states and cities had unsuccessfully passed similar laws against selling violent video games to children, and now these games are wrapped nationwide by this recent Supreme Court ruling in the embrace of the Constitution.
The California law did not prohibit the video game industry from producing and selling these realistically violent games, and didn't stop parents from buying or allowing their kids to buy them. The law said that merchants could not bypass parents and sell directly to children without parental approval.
As Justice Thomas explained in his eloquent dissent, it is "absurd" to suggest that the First Amendment's "freedom of speech"' includes a right to speak to minors without going through the minors' parents. His dissent gives us a history lesson showing that the First Amendment was written in a society that assumed parents had absolute authority over the upbringing of their children, "including control over the books that children read."
The Court's majority couldn't see any difference between "The Divine Comedy" (assuming minors are capable of reading classic works of literature), or "Grimms' Fairy Tales," and teaching kids to role-play criminal acts such as torture and murder acted out on the screen in vivid color. Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that the court's decision now allows the industry to sell minors "games" that show victims "dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire and chopped into little pieces. ... Blood gushes, spatters, and pools."
Justices Alito and Roberts also stated, "There are games in which a player can take on the identity and re-enact the killings carried out by the perpetrators of the murders at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. ... There is a game in which players engage in 'ethnic cleansing' and can choose to gun down African-Americans, Latinos, or Jews."
There is a big difference between reading the printed page and role-playing criminal acts. Reading a book takes the words only as far as the reader's own imagination.
But video games blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, and train kids to be highly proficient murderers when they do go off the deep end. Brain research indicates that children's and teenagers' brains are still developing and may store violent images as real memories.
Mass murders committed by teenage boys or young adults are often left unexplained by the media. Many of these young killers were addicted to disturbingly violent video games, playing these violent games for hundreds of hours a year.
Virtually every school massacre can be traced to the young killers' addiction to violent video games. The video game industry reaps tens of billions of dollars in revenue and now even surpasses Hollywood in profits, revenues and influence.
It's obvious that this is not what George Washington and James Madison had in mind in guaranteeing free speech to Americans. The court has stretched the First Amendment beyond recognition to infringe on the rights of parents to protect their own children from exploitation.
This decision has left vulnerable the families whose parents lack the time or knowledge or resources to protect their own children from exploitation, and to safeguard them against an industry larger and more influential than Hollywood. This decision encourages a further coarsening and degradation of our culture.
Justice Thomas pointed out that the American people have always been able to pass laws to protect children and respect parental rights. Examples are laws restricting alcohol and pornography to minors.
Supremacist judges who think they can substitute their personal opinions for the Constitution and for duly enacted federal and state laws are a major part of our current culture war. It's overdue for the American people to recognize how the judiciary has grabbed power to decide culture issues that should be decided by the legislatures.
Five federal circuits have handed down decisions that reject parents' rights, upholding the court-created right of public schools to teach children whatever they want. These decisions involve teaching acceptance of homosexual behavior, Islamic ideology and practices, and evolution, and requiring schoolchildren to fill out questionnaires demanding answers to scores of nosy, leading questions about sex, illegal drugs and suicide.
The ball is now back in the court of the American people. They should study the actions of supremacist judges and roll back their mischief by demanding that they rule in favor of the U.S. Constitution as it was written and not as the judges wish it had been written.
The companies have the right to make them or not make them. People have the right to buy them, or not buy them. Personal responsibility, a sense of right and wrong, and dignity will do more to improve society than harping about video games.
The Court's majority (7-2, incidentally) re-affirmed, but distinguished, prior precedent which had upheld bans on selling pornography to minors, holding that obscenity is a historically-recognized exception to the First Amendment, but that violence is not.
True. That's why courts have had so many problems in the past trying to define pornography. The ACLU believes that if we can't define a "standard," then there should be no standards. (Now about those movies with those pesky "R" ratings....)
Indeed. We weren’t allowed to play violent video games as kids. My brother keeps the mature console games locked up and the kids’ PCs are monitored. I, for one, am looking forward to playing Saints Row 3 with my brother once the kiddies are at school come November.
My understanding (I could be wrong) is that the justices determined that violence did not rise to the level of obscenity in the same way that sex does. Pornography would still meet the definition of obscene but these games wouldn’t.
In some ways, yes. Why are video games singled out for controls that effectively no longer exist for other media - like television? What content appears in a video game that a child can’t access on cable TV? Or at school? So then regulating video games leads to regulating all sorts of other things, too. I’d rather the Justices err on the side of freedom than on the side of the nanny state.
The Court are not the villains in this case, merely cowards. (Excepting Thomas and Breyer, that is.)
What’s truly disappointing is that such games find a market in my country - though I wonder how much of that market is comprised of those whom the California ban sought to protect.
In modern history, hasn’t violence always been a part of entertainment media?
Of the top 10 in this list: http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/ I count 5 that could be considered to have significant violence.
Yes, as my wife and I can raise our children despite the First Amendment and do not need Nanny State Sycophants to guide us.
If there you have any other dictates on my parenting, please email me those orders.
But, please do not ask your heroes in the Federal Government to install your Nanny State fantasy.
Asking me to watch a violent act and asking me to commit one are not the same.
The difference is in what happens to the viewer/participant. When I watch the movie bad guy murder somebody, I can side with the good guy who’ll eventually bring him to justice. But when I’M the bad guy, that choice evaporates, and I take a side which I shouldn’t.
That may not present a great problem in adults (though I believe it does.) But who could argue that it’s not damaging to children?
Anyway...We can’t complain about the state of our nation when we permit this sort of thing among ourselves and our posterity. We ingest all sorts of filth, and then scratch our heads in wonder when we get sick.
I propose a ban on WoW due to its addictive nature. Cue nerd rage.
It’s a pretty small chunk of the market that’s minors. For one thing the ESRB already bans sales a M rated games to minors and will yank their products from the shelves of stores failing to follow the rules (one of the primary reasons this law was stupid and useless). For another thing the primary demographic for video game purchases is males between the ages of 25 and 40, that’s the target market and that’s where the money is spent.
Free speech today means only: The ability to use foul language in the presence of women and minors; the advocacy of treason, the publishing and distribution of pornography, the teaching of the benefits of homosexuality to five year old children, any attack on any aspect of the Christian religion; sedition and/or any attack on the nations patriotic symbols. Any language expression whether written, oral or pictorial which harms our society in any degree.
This thread has a twin from a few days back. Truly scary how many Freepers want the nanny state, want government to make parental decisions, want arbitrary standards to replace first amendment protections, and flatly refuse to admit it.
I see this thread going down the same path already.
Fair point.
One particular point you may not realize, though, in the most popular violent games you are the good guy killing the bad guy. The past 5 or so #1 games on my system you play the good guy. Two of them you are a super soldier defending Earth against aliens(Halo 2 & 3). The next two you are a special ops US soldier taking down terrorists(Modern Warfare 1 & 2). The most recent you are a black ops US soldier once again taking down terrorists(CoD: Black Ops).
Gamers enjoy playing the hero, and developers know it.
Dead on. Absolutely dead on.
Yet these are the same people who screams at the GOP for not cutting the size of Government. My attitude is this. You can’t be for Small Government if you want the Government to ban video games or anything that you deem immoral..
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