The Communications Decency Act (CDA) is only part of the Telecommunications Reform Act 1996, which was enacted to ban the display of obscene or indecent material on the internet. I actually wrote a blog about the CDA a couple of months ago. Many people were outraged by this Act, claiming it violated their First Amendment rights. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the government and in 1996, a three-judge panel ruled parts of the CDA constitutional. However, the ruling of the judges was appealed and in 1997, in the case Reno vs. ACLU, the Supreme Court found that the CDA was an “unconstitutional restriction on the internet”, and it “deserves a full First Amendment protection.” I don’t agree with the courts decision because today, pornographic sites like Playboy and Penthouse can open there sites to children, without being punished, which I find astonishing. Children should not be able to access these kinds of sites just by a click of the button, it’s wrong and disgusting. However, the positive news to come out of this was the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was enacted in 1998, “that severely restricts any speech on the Web that is "harmful to minors," and imposes steep fines and prison terms for violators.” Again, this Act was challenged by the ACLU, and again it went all the way up to the Supreme Court where they found COPA unconstitutional. It frustrates me that people are against laws that protect our children. It makes no sense to me that these groups are trying to fight something intended for a good purpose. I guess that’s why we have lawyers.
April 14, 2006 at 4:57 pm
It frustrates me that people are against laws that protect our children.
You are setting up a straw man here. I know of nobody who said “let’s not protect children.” What they did say is “Let’s not reduce all speech to speech that is suitable for adults.” They also said “Let parents be parents, rather than the state.”
So the objection wasn’t to protecting children: that’s something we are all interested in. The objection was to trampling the Bill of Rights to do it.
Perhaps we should take a page out of the European book. There is not the puritanical control over media there (even in countries without a clear right to communication), and the children still manage to grow up and be “normal.” In fact, their abortion rates and teen pregnancy rates are far below that in the US. Maybe we should really start protecting our children by not imagining that sex is an evil thing.