Via the LAT: Supreme Court lets Internet porn law die
A long legal drive to shield children from sexually explicit material on the Web ended in failure Wednesday when the Supreme Court let a 10-year-old anti-pornography law die quietly.In striking down the law on free-speech grounds, the justices said parents could protect their children by installing software filters on their computers.
Anti-pornography activists said the court’s action, coming a day after former President Bush left office, signaled the government’s bid to restrict pornography on the Web had come to an end.
“The timing puts an exclamation point on it. There’s very little reason for hope on this issue,” said Patrick Trueman, a Virginia lawyer who headed the Justice Department’s anti-obscenity unit from 1988 to 1993. “I don’t think Congress will try again to protect children from pornography.”
To me, the irony here is that what the Court’s ruling effectively says is that it is ultimately the responsibility of the individual to watch after what their children encounter on the internet, which is a personal responsibility approach that Republicans allegedly favor.
Following on that theme, I was struck by this:
Last year, the U.S. appeals court in Philadelphia struck down the law as unconstitutional, saying the software filters were “equally effective” as a means of protecting children from online pornography.In October, Bush administration lawyers disputed that claim and appealed to the Supreme Court. If the law were finally struck down, it “would leave millions of children unprotected from the harmful effects of the enormous amount of pornography” on the Internet, they said.
Since when is it a constitutional responsibility (or even within the constitutional powers of) the Congress (or the Federal government in general) to protect children from internet pornography? Understand, please, I do not want my children exposed to pornography, either, but it is my job to make sure that they don’t sit in my living room looking for pictures of nekkid people,1 not the government’s.
Setting aside the salaciousness of this specific issue, I do think things like this are an excellent example of some of the problems that the Republicans have had for years–they claim to favor small government, a narrow interpretation of the constitutional policy prerogatives of the Congress, and personal responsibility in the citizenry unless, for some reason, they don’t (e.g Terri Schiavo).
And really, anyone who thought the law had a prayer of being an efficacious method to hide all sexually explicit material on the internet simply had no idea what the internet is, or how it works:
The Child Online Protection Act made it a crime to put sexually explicit material on a website for commercial gain unless the sponsor used some means, such as requiring a credit card, to keep out minors. It never went into effect.
And yes, I know that part of the timeframe invovled includes the Clinton administration, and therefore a Democratic president. However, the laws in question were passed by a GOP-controlled Congress and the Bush administration’s DOJ has made pornography a special focus.
The case in question was Mukasey vs. ACLU.
Sphere: Related Content- Indeed, the only internet-connected computer the children have access to is in the family room, partially so that I know what they are accessing. [↩]
January 22nd, 2024 at 11:34 am
I personally blame Al Gore, inventor of the internet.
January 22nd, 2024 at 11:36 am
Amen, bro.
I just hope that there aren’t any nekkid pictures of him anywhere in the intertubes!
January 22nd, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Clinton’s a Democrat, but he’s a Southern Democrat so he’s willing to act conservatively once in a while.
The law itself was bad from a practical standpoint because it was written when Congress had no idea what the Internet was but had a bad feeling about some vague danger out there (kind of like the repeated attempts to ban human cloning before anybody’s successfully cloned a human).
January 22nd, 2024 at 12:16 pm
[...] Good. [...]
January 22nd, 2024 at 12:31 pm
[...] Steven Taylor pretty much captures my view on this: I do not want my children exposed to pornography, either, but it is my job to make sure that they don’t sit in my living room looking for pictures of nekkid people, not the government’s. [...]
January 22nd, 2024 at 2:17 pm
“…and the Bush administration’s DOJ has made pornography a special focus.”
Just like with Keating, back in the 1980’s - the seriously financially corrupt like to point to sex and obscenity to distract from their corruption.
January 22nd, 2024 at 3:17 pm
Regulating those commercial sites really protected kids, because without commercial sites no one can find a speck of that kind of material on the Internet.