Terry Mitchell

Scalia’s Nonsensical Reasoning



Posted: Monday, November 15, 2010

by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com

Until recently, I had always believed that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a sensible man. His comments regarding a case that is currently before the high court has made me reconsider. He and the other justices are currently considering the constitutionality of California's attempt to ban the sale of certain violent video games to minors.

Scalia, who seems to accept the fact that sexually explicit games can legally be restricted to adults only, appears to have a major problem with that same thing being done for violent games. His rationale seems to be that adding violence to the list of the kinds of content that cannot be sold to minors would open the door to similar restrictions on other things. He apparently sees it as the proverbial camel's nose in the tent.

But that line of thinking makes no sense at all. The door was already opened when we started banning the sale of sexually explicit material to kids. Scalia sees that as different, however. He notes that obscenity has never been protected by the First Amendment. But that's irrelevant argument. We're not talking about obscenity here, as that would illegal for anyone, adult or child.

The kind of sexually explicit material that is restricted to adults only might be considered indecent, but it is constitutionally-protected just the same. Therefore, once we go down the road of imposing restrictions on one form of constitutionally protected type of media, that opens the door to restricting other forms of constitutionally-protected media.

In other words, Justice Scalia fails to understand the fact that the camel got his nose into the tent a long time ago. Besides, could violence be any less harmful to kids that sex is? I don't think so. Therefore, if we're going to ban the sales of sexually explicit material to minors, then I don't see what all the fuss is with banning the sales of violent material to those same minors.
Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. He is also the owner of a new privacy-enhanced search engine - http://www.SearchMost.com.

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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Jennifer Stewart
 1 year 189 days ago.
153 fans.
I totally agree. I've never been able to understand why violence is considered less harmful than sexual material. This judge needs his head read.
» left by Terry Mitchell 1 year 189 days ago.
93 fans.
Yes, Jennifer, that's one of the weirder things about our culture.
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