Might as well censor Michelangelo

Unlike television, the internet is difficult to keep track of. With the television, there is the V-chip, which allows parents to control what their children are able to view, and there are Federal Communications Commission regulations that keep indecency and obscenity off the air, at least until the kiddies go to bed. There is much debate over what indecency and obscenity constitute, but at least there will always be porn on the internet right? Children, on the other hand, are a completely different issue. We are obsessed with protecting our kids from anything unwholesome. I think FCC censorship is enough as it is!

The case of Roth v. United States ruled that anything containing material that has “no redeeming social importance” could be banned by the government. I am always unsure as to what is considered to have redeeming social importance. All this is cleared up in Miller v. California with the Miller Test which held that three points must be hit for anything to be considered offensive. 1) The government can restrict obscene material that the average person with community standards finds it appeals to prurient interests. 2) The work, sexual conduct or excretory functions, is “patently offensive” Memoirs v. Massachussetts. 3) The work as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. I think that the government is scared of sex and potty jokes….seriously.

This country slaves away to make the internet safer for all children. The Child Online Protection Act, COPA, which apparently protected minors from harmful materials on the internet was rejected again in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit due to its violation of the First Amendment. COPA does not necessarily prevent minors from accessing foreign harmful materials alone makes it possible that filtering software might be more effective in serving Congress’ goals. Also the term “community standards” upon which the materials were to be deemed harmful were said to be too broad. The reason COPA has been ruled unconstitutional and rejected so many times is because it oversteps the boundaries of the First amendment. We need to protect our rights to look up whatever the hell we want!

We cannot stop our kids from being exposed to obscenity. If they don’t hear it from us, they will hear it somewhere else. I know it’s difficult for parents to hear, but your children are not mush! They can make decisions and judgments on their own. Nobody’s daughters are wearing boob cut-out shirts to be like Holly from the “Girls Next Door,” and nobody’s sons are making out with every girl in the pool like “The Bachelor.” There are so many obscene materials out there, not everyone is part of a mass society where we allow the media to affect us without interpretation. I know I’m not the only person who believes that America is a puritanical society. I actually think this is why we are falling behind in the world. We have so many regulations up, it could be to the point that we even though we are not exposed to the “obscene,” but we are not exposed to anything else. We see people getting murdered all the time in movies and television, but it’s not a monkey-see-monkey-do situation. Unless we are the Natural Born Killers.