My first thought when reading this, and apparently a thought on the minds of Justices Breyer and Thomas, was: then how the heck can we say it’s okay to ban sales of porn? Why aren’t those same constitutional limits on governmental action applicable to images of naked people?
Justice Scalia must think he covered this distinction in his opinion:
But isn’t that exactly what a ban on porn sales does? It seeks “solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them”, doesn’t it? I mean, has any real “harm” ever been shown to occur from young people seeing pornography?
My $.02: lift the ban on pornography. It makes no sense and cannot be justified under the US Constitution.
Well, they aren’t exactly the same thing. It’s like saying that because we allow violent video games we should allow smoking or drinking.
Mind, I don’t have a real issue with minors having access to porn (nor with them having access to violent video games), but because one thing is ruled acceptable doesn’t mean that everything is acceptable.
I don’t believe that porn in and of itself is harmful, and I think it should be up to the parents to decide one way or another until the minor is of whatever age society feels they become adults. The same goes for video games, of course…and everything else. But our society isn’t really structured to allow adults to make decisions even for themselves, let alone for their children, and getting most Americans to say it’s ok to sell porn to minors AS minors is going to be a bit of a hard sell. Of course, since porn is free on the internet, and since kids all have at least cell phones these days (and most parents are clueless about what their kids watch or preventing them from searching at will for whatever they want) I’d say it’s not really a major problem.
What the fuck video game is Breyer talking about here? I’m not aware of any games like this existing, and if they did, I’m sure they’d be rated A or at least M, and therefore, not legally available for sale to minors.
You seem to be under the impression that the ESRB ratings carry some some of legal weight with respect to sales. They do not. They are applied because the producer has voluntarily submitted his work to the rating board/system.
As the SCOTUS just ruled, any attempt to legally bar those sales based on age and content are unconstitutional.
I’m not aware of any GTA game (or any other) where you can do that. There’s probably one somewhere though; I’ve heard of one created by some racist group that lets you run a concentration camp.
Right. You are assuming though that this guy has actually PLAYED GTA. :dubious: I know a lot of folks who haven’t played a video game in their lives (my folks spring to mind) who seemingly (think) they know a lot about them because of what they’ve read or seen on Fox.
Heck, it could practically be Custer’s Revenge, at least from the video I’ve seen of the “gameplay.” Not that I expect a SC Justice to have heard of an unofficial Atari game from the 80s.
Do you have any examples of statutes or ordinances that forbid sales of sexual material to minors?
It seems to me that we have zoning/licensing ordinances that instruct sexually oriented businesses to restrict entry of minors, and we sometimes have ordinances forbidding the sale to anyone of obscene (as that term is legally defined) material. It’s not clear to me that we actually have statutes that forbid the sale of a non-obscene sexual book to a minor.
In general parlance, pornography is the same as obscene material. The point stands: if violent material cannot be restricted without running afoul of the 1st Amendment, then I don’t see how obscene material can be either.
But the definition of what is or isn’t ‘obscene’ is pretty variable and has changed substantially over time.
I don’t think that it’s a First Amendment issue in any case. There are a lot of things that society has decided that children can or can’t buy or do that has little or nothing to do with the Constitution or the various Amendments.
Why isn’t it a 1st Amendment issue? What, in your opinion, separates images of naked people from images of people being killed or maimed that makes it not “entertainment” and into something different, such that it should not enjoy 1st Amendment protection?
I did a quick google for “video game torture” and found that there are a number of games that involve torture and a few that employ it as the sole object of the game.
World of Warcraft has for more than 2.5 years included at least one quest (The Art Of Persuasion) that requires you to torture a captive subject, and it’s arguably the most-played game on the planet.
I haven’t played them myself, but I hear that God Of War and Red Dead Redemption contain instances similar to what Justice Breyer described.
Also there was the now-infamous RapeLay game from Illusion Soft.
So, yes, games that involve torture are out there, and not all of them bother to seek a rating with the ESRB.
I’ve found myself becoming more and more indifferent to the question of whether any particular restriction on pornography (or strip clubs or whatever) jives with the labyrinth of Supreme Court Rulings that’s sprung up surrounding these issues over the decades. What I feel is that either we should legalize the sale of pornography to minors or we should make some attempt to enforce the laws we have. As things stand now, millions of kids download pornography every day; those voluntary “don’t click unless you’re 18 or older” pages don’t seem to work, for some reason. So the message kids get in the current situation is that laws are optional and laughable.
Because the first amendment protects speech, and obscenity isn’t speech.
Don’t ask me to defend that, because I can’t, and as far as I know, no one else can, either, but that’s the legal reasoning.
Aside from the fact that the video game rating system is an industry standard, and not backed by force of law, the entire point of this decision was whether or not A or M rated games are legally available for sale to minors.