There is always going to be a tension between public safety and first amendment freedoms such as speech. Both are legitimate concerns of a free people. Some people would never, if completely free to choose, become addicted to porn, drugs, whatever, but are exposed to it very young, while still forming their capacity for discernment and judgment. It is really no fairer to blame these young people for the abuses they endure than to blame a rape victim for the deeds of the rapist. Many of them would never get involved in making porn but for manufactured dependencies, including drugs, foisted on them by porn groomers. It is not a pretty business model.
There are credible reports of a place near here (central Illinois) called “the farm,” where such “grooming” occurs on a regular basis. It is a vortex into which naïve rural teens are drawn ever deeper into a lifestyle from which there appears, to them, to be no escape. And because of the vast revenue involved, a number of local pols look the other way, including some here in Springfield. Don’t ask me which party. I believe it is a bipartisan corruption.
And thus porn raises a legitimate question of public safety. I favor laws that would restrict access to and production of pornography, if for no other reason than to delay a young person’s contact with such material until they have a chance to make fully free, fully informed choices. I further favor reforms that make “grooming” operations so painful that they cannot find a home in any state, least of all mine. That would involve punishing the politicians who ignore them as well as the people who run them.
What about free speech? The First Amendment was not designed to protect absolutely all possible forms of speech, least of all those that routinely involve criminal or quasi-criminal entanglements on the production side. Under precedent law, for example, we are not “free” to shout “fire” in a crowded theater if in fact there is no fire. Likewise, obscene speech does not enjoy the same level of protection as political speech, and that’s good. Society can make value judgments, and can work to encode them into law. That also is a form of free speech.
The problem we have in our post-Christian culture is that we are having such a hard time defining “obscene” that the meaning of the category is fading, and our ability to protect ourselves from it is fading as well. However, the whole point of natural law is that it speaks to Christian and non-Christian minds alike. Some things just do not have enough value that we must protect them at the cost of systematically and unnecessarily losing wave after wave of young people to a life of corruption. It is a disease and it walks in the company of real diseases. We have a legitimate interest in defending ourselves against it, not just as individuals, but as a culture.
Government is designed to promote Virtue. Anything that debases human beings-—make them nothing but animals with urges—with no rationality—is dehumanizing and destroys civil societies particularly the children—the future of society.
All the Founders and all philosophers knew that without Virtue, you can not have a free society.
Government has the power to block obscenity-—we had that until The Beats and ACLU and Flint, etc., and mass agitprop from Kinsey and the Deep Throat hollywood degenerates, who forced out Just Law to protect their degenerates, sick twisted ideas—so they could mainstream them to the children in their programing and Sex Ed classes in Public schools. It is uncontitutional.
Defining obscene is precluded with the sin lobby’s efforts to name all taboos hate and intolerance.
We are going to bottom out at cannibalism and ritual murder and sex abuse.