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Supreme Court: Obscenity Still in Eye of Beholder

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Posted on Mar 24, 2006

In declining to hear a case on obscenity, the Supreme Court left it up to individual communities to decide whether something constitutes pornography. But in the borderless Internet age, what really constitutes a community?

Justicemag:

With just four words - “the judgment is affirmed” - the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Nitke v. Gonzales. Those four words may be the most important Internet purveyors of sexual content hear for quite some time.

Even in our federal system of government, the law concerning obscenity is a legal oddity. A photograph that in New York would be considered protected speech under the First Amendment could in Alabama be considered obscene, making the photographer and distributors subject to felony charges. That’s a consequence of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 case, Miller v. California, in which the court ruled that obscenity was essentially a subjective judgment, and called for prosecutors, judges and juries to apply “community standards” in determining what speech was obscene and what was protected. In the age of the Internet, a new issue has been raised - if something considered free speech in New York is accessible in Alabama, where it’s considered obscene, what standard should be used? By rejecting the case, the Supreme Court has left that question open.

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By R. A. Earl, March 27, 2006 at 8:32 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

The internet has created, for the first time in all recorded history, a GLOBAL VILLAGE, whose boundaries, at the least for the present, cannot contain/control “information” in digitized form.

Call me a naive simpleton but when I encounter something that offends my sensibilities on the “net” I just “click” and it’s gone. I long ago outgrew choosing to participate in battles I cannot possibly win. On the internet, “I” am my “community” and “I” set the standards in it.

There are laws against child abuse… in fact, abuse, period. “Abuse” is clearly defined in law. However, those laws don’t prevent some deranged people from perpetrating their crimes. And they never will. So all we can do is continue to find the criminals and make a big public issue of putting them away for life.

You notice I’ve not dealt with issues of nudity, sexuality between consenting adults (those past puberty), or any of the others in the wide range of human behaviors which do NOT involve ABUSE. That’s because it’s nobody’s business but those involved. If you don’t like it… TOUGH. “Click” and it goes away FOR YOU. And that’s as it should be. You don’t get to decide where the “click” point is for ME. Not now. Not ever.

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