WHTT Pornography and the First Amendment
Among other parental obligations to their children, parents should protect their children from bad influences such as drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) and pornography. Pornography should be defined as violence instead of nudity. The constant barrage of violence in TV and movies is a much greater threat to the proper development of a child than if the child occasionally sees normal male or female nudity. Furthermore, the continuous exposure to violence from the entertainment industry tends to desensitize children to the pain that violence inflicts on people. That, in turn, makes violent behavior seem much more acceptable, and thus contributes to the insane level of violence in society today.
Violent pornography should be illegal in all its forms, such as hate actions (painting swastikas or burning crosses), drawings or photos of violence, books which "paint" mental images of violence, and movies, plays, or TV shows which depict violent actions. The First Amendment protects the right to debate the value of ideas, such as this definition of pornography, but does not give anyone the right to cause violence or to simulate violence by literary or visual images.
This is not a new interpretation of the First Amendment. There are already laws against inciting a crowd to riot and against conspiracy to commit a crime, even though either of those actions may be little more than an exercise of speech. The First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech is meant only to ensure that people have the right to debate ideas, not to use verbal, literary, or visual images to cause or to simulate actions which would be clearly illegal. The First Amendment protects a person's right to agree or disagree about whether it should be legal or illegal to riot, commit a crime, incite to riot, or conspire to commit a crime. The First Amendment does not promise any right to use either words or images to artistically perform an action that would be criminal if actually done. Murder, theft, rape, assault, and many other actions are illegal. It should also be illegal to simulate any of those actions either verbally or visually.
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