"Above all else, the First Amendment means that the government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content."
-- SUPREME COURT JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL (1908-1993)"If you can't say 'fuck', you can't say 'fuck the government.'"
-- LENNY BRUCE
N.B. -- The Communications Decency Act was declared to be unconstitutional by a panel of federal judges in June of 1996. Let freedom ring.I'll leave this page up, though, because I think the words still ring true.
I've always been inspired by the writings of Henry David Thoreau, but perhaps his essay that affected me the most was "Civil Disobedience", in which he discussed a citizen's options when faced with bad laws and immoral acts of government.
The so-called "Communications Decency Act" is an immoral, unconstitutional law. I live in the United States of America, a country governed by consent of its people, under a Constitution whose First Amendment, the first in our Bill of Rights, states that "Congress shall pass no law ... abridging freedom of speech."
This law was written by ignorant old men who do not even begin to understand what they are regulating and censoring, and supported by a dangerous, radical religious right-wing to further their theocratic agenda. Furthermore, and depressingly, it was passed by our Congress. Falsely using the otherwise legitimate reason of "protecting children", they've seen fit to reduce American's use of the Internet, an international network of networks built by scientists and educators, to the level of a school child.
If you want to protect children from what might be on the Internet, then you as parents should take some responsibility and regulate its use within your families. The government has no business doing this.
What does this all mean? According to this law, if you post messages to a public mailing list, Usenet newsgroup, participate in an IRC or chat session, or maintain your own World Wide Web page, ftp or gopher archive, you could potentially face $250,000 fines or 2 years in jail if someone, somewhere considers the material you post to be "indecent" or "patently offensive".
I will not stand by idly while my elected government violates our own Constitution and tells me what I can and can not say. I will say or publish whatever I damned well please, be it on paper or in a page on my Web site, whenever I want to say it. Whether I want to write about music or cooking, whether I want to write erotica or display a nude painting, whether I want to disseminate information to young people about safe sex, whether I want to criticize the government, whether I want to write or say the word "fuck" or any other word in whatever context I see fit, or whether I wish to talk about abortion or disseminate information about it (the most mind-boggling prohibition of the Act) ... the Constitution protects and enshrines my right to say or publish it.
By the way, the address for the Los Angeles Planned Parenthood Clinic is 1920 Marengo Avenue, and their phone number is (213) 223-4462.
Thing is, am I willing to go to jail over this? Scary thought. Is the government willing to find, prosecute and jail me for what I say, and take up jail space better filled by a violent criminal? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. But I'll tell you this ... I won't let the threat of that abridge my freedom of speech. And if the law is not repealed, I'll say with great sadness that I'd rather leave the country in which I grew up than to retain citizenship in a country which is not free.
Luckily, it seems as if it won't come to that ... the courts very correctly voided the law. SHAME on the politicians who voted for it anyway, knowing it was unconstitutional, for the mere political expediency of doing so. I'll remember that on election day.
I'll also remember the threats posed by the passage of this now-voided law, and by those who supported it. If we forget, we'll end up fighting it all over again. This page has already generated attacks and criticism from at least one reader who seems to believe that the Constitution of the United States only protects speech that she thinks is appropriate, and that she supports governmental censorship of "curse words", images of nudity, and all else she believes is "indecent".
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Love,
Chuck
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