First Amendment at Risk with Republican Obscenity Bills

The SCREEN Act is a good step in the direction of having the FCC regulate websites. As a parent, we need age verification technology to ensure that children cannot access inappropriate content. That said, restricting pornography from the underaged is not enough. Hopefully, amendments to the Act will go further and restrict other topics like alcohol, drugs, guns, and as every parent will tell you, in-game purchases. If that seems like an overreach based on restricting ambiguous terms, which will give the government way too much unchecked power and not respect individual liberty, then you agree with the Supreme Court, which has historically found that all prior similar acts by Congress were not undertaken in the least restrictive means possible to protect a compelling government interest. Think about it this way, is a minor who is 7 years old the same as one who is 17 and should they have the same restrictions? Also, what does pornography mean anyway? Does it include anatomy pictures or health lessons? In short, this law is tone deaf to reality.

Speaking about what pornography means, Senator Mike Lee also wants to define it in his Interstate Obscenity Definition Act. While this is a great concept because pornography is now nationally available, rather than locally available, it includes terrible execution by the Senator. As any Avenue Q fan can tell you, the internet is for porn. Well, not for Mike Lee if he has his way. The Senator wants almost all pornography to be swept under the rubric of obscenity and therefore, not subject to First Amendment Protections. Whatever happened to fighting for our Constitution? Under our Constitution, as opined by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, one can only define obscenity by first applying the contemporary community standards of a work, as a whole. Senator Lee appears to believe himself smarter than the learned Justice and his Bill to create a national pornography definition law changes the line between obscenity and protected speech by ignoring the time period that the work is evaluated, a review of it in its entirety, and, most importantly, the use of community standards. Hopefully, the Democratic Senate blocks this Bill from going anywhere fast as restricting speech is always a slippery slope.