Just when you thought that the interpretation of American laws couldn't get
any stranger, the U.S. Supreme Court issues this ruling.

So, it's okay to systematically remove God, the Bible and all mention of
Jesus Christ from public American life through various local and federal
court rulings, but prohibiting videos of animal cruelty goes against free
speech? There is something seriously wrong with this picture.

What will they think of next? Or maybe that's precisely the problem. They
are just not thinking at all! :(


Disgusting but Not Illegal

New York Times Editorial

August 1, 2010


Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., who has become one of the First Amendment's
most adamant defenders, led the Supreme Court earlier this year in refusing
to create a new exception to the free speech clause. With only one dissent,
the court struck down a law that banned depictions of animal cruelty. The
House has come back with a replacement bill that is an improvement over its
predecessor but still misses the constitutional point Justice Roberts made.

Historically, the Supreme Court has recognized only a small handful of
exceptions to free speech. As Justice Roberts explained in his opinion in
April, the court has long held that government can ban obscenity,
defamation, fraud, incitement and speech integral to criminal conduct, a
category that includes child pornography. When Congress tried to add
depiction of animal cruelty to this list, the court balked.

Justice Roberts said the court cannot create a new exception to free speech
by simply balancing the value of the speech against its harm to society. The
First Amendment "reflects a judgment by the American people that the
benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs," he
wrote. "Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment
simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it."

Almost no one would say depictions of animals being crushed or mutilated are
worthwhile. The concept is so repulsive that animal rights advocates
persuaded a very busy House to pass a new bill outlawing them.

Unlike the first one, the new bill excludes videos of hunting, trapping or
fishing, or of normal agricultural practices. It bans any images of actual
conduct in which animals are intentionally crushed, burned, drowned,
suffocated or impaled in a manner that would violate federal or state animal
cruelty laws. Most important, it simply declares that all such images are
obscene.

Obscenity, however, is limited in American law to certain prurient sexual
content. Cruelty to animals does not fit that category, and Congress cannot
simply create a new category of obscenity. A better analogy would have been
to child pornography, in which the act of taking pictures of children is
itself illegal. But Justice Roberts said animal cruelty is not in that
category either.

The First Amendment is a remarkably fragile institution that does not need
more exceptions carved from its meaning. But attempts to do that arise all
the time. A California case coming before the court in the next term
attempts to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, though there is
no recognized exception to the First Amendment for violence, either. These
games, and animal cruelty videos, may be repugnant to many, but America's
legal tradition keeps them from being illegal.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your Download Center 4 Mac BBS Software & Christian Files.  We Use Hermes II


--- Hermes Web Tosser 1.1