The amendment would allow for a new body of government to violate a corporation's or individual's right to Freedom of Speech if that speech upsets, offends, or makes other individuals or groups uncomfortable. This body of government would be established as the Federal Communications Commission. It would be the constitutional variation of the currently illegal body of government by the same name. If this amendment does not pass congress (and I don't know why it wouldn't?) than in protest we will eliminate the FCC all together. See the chaos as your protectors are barred from their duties!

All right which television show did you want to see some T&A but didn't get to?

And this is how tyranny starts.

Mystic: you don't have to go home, but you can't post here.

I think he is beginning to understand English.

Please, I'm begging you. Don't post again. This thread is about the fact that the constitution doesn't provide for the FCC. Please don't start your inane bullstat.

I just lost all faith in humanity.

End your life now. I mean it.

No, see: that was what I didn't want you to do, Mystic. That wasn't on topic. That wasn't even in the same ballpark. My post is a pointed argument against an unconstitutional body of government that has been given the exact powers we escaped in the 1620's. You're talking about sided and arguable topics that can be debated within our constitution. Furthermore, you're using your bias as some arrogant and fallacious act of certainty. Don't.

I'm pretty sure the FCC has been upheld as constitutional. I would assume by the supreme court which, of course, deemed itself the final authority of what is constitutional. The whole thing being "public airways" (which is a crock). But I don't have a problem with at least some sense of decency on public channels and radio. Not that there seems to be much left of that anyway. Instead of T&A and swearing I get blurry spots and beeps. As Kirby has said before censorship isn't the answer to the problem but neither is unrestricted hard core material to a society that cares more about instant gratification than it does for its own children.

We're now going to ignore mystic.

Wookie: Stop justifying unconstitutional ideals based on morals. Morally, I completely and utterly agree with you. Constitutionally, I think you're full of yourself.

Of course, but what Kirby (and others like myself) is saying, is that that ruling is bogus.


Aw, yes, children are so innocent and wonderful! We should shield them from the real world, that will help them develop!

If you don't like it, change the channel. If you still don't like it, turn it off.

Edit: This post did have some relavance at one point...I'll come back to it.

...which isn't supposed to be the function of the judiciary?

If society wasn't interested in self-gratification then exposing content like that on "public airwaves" wouldn't be a problem. If parents were responsible enough to actually have children then they'd turn the television off.

You know what? Television shouldn't exist at all. It's basically masturbation as-is. At least video games exercise your problem solving and visual mathematics abilities, even if they do completely rob you of your depth perception. Television is without merit.

Of course the supreme court makes bogus rulings. They ruled themselves the ability to do so.

We all know that if all regulations were done away with the public airwaves would be full of porn and extremely violent material. It's ridiculous to think that that type of material is not harmful to small children especially unfettered. And it's a cop out to say change the channel. If you want smut, curse words, and bloody beatdowns pay for cable. There is no good to be had by loosening FCC restrictions.

I find it amazing the way certain types decide they want to interpret the ammendments. Oh, the founding fathers couldn't fathom machine guns when they wrote the second ammendment but somehow they really meant that we should get to see double penetration on PBS when they wrote the first.

Of course it is. They say so.

You're pandering to mystic. We all agreed to not do that in this thread.

And you're absolutely wrong. Freedom of ideas only improves the quality of ideas. This is why we have a free economy. It improves the quality of products.

Well, it's a mostly-free economy.

Again, we're ignoring Mystic because he chooses to argue topics in his own magical world of rhetoric and absolutes.

Don't tell me what I am and am not doing.

Baby. :-P

I will not resort to insults.

You will instead resort to assertions that you are driven to insults but have the restraint to not use them!



Darn those unfettered children. Shielding children from this kind of reality too well, though, just makes them maladjusted and confused in the end.

I wholeheartedly support bringing this amendment to a vote and then killing it very, very dead.

Oh? And who would fund such broadcasts? Advertisers won't touch it, unless they are advertising sex toys, which doesn't even appeal to the mainstream audience. I think this is a case where the free market really would benefit the consumers a lot. If people don't want hardcore sex on the airways, it won't be there, since no one would make a profit off it.


Is it? I'm not so sure. How about some evidence to back that up? Like maybe a peer-reviewed article from, oh let's say, the American Psychological Association? Full frontal nudity is not uncommon for commercials in many European nations, and they seem to be doing already. The nations of Scandinavia have among the highest living standard in the world. Extremely high education and literacy rates, etc.


Why? The v-chip is actually a good idea. Shows can still be rated. If parents don't want their kids seeing it, they can block it with a v-chip enabled device. Or they can be good parents and do it themselves.

How do you define "harmful"? The US is still a puritan society, you only have to look as far as the Super Bowl to see that. "Oh noes, a woman's boob was on -screen for a split second, let's sue the **** out of EVERYBODY!" You don't get that crap anywhere else.

We shouldn't need a governmental body to step in and shield children for ****ty parents. If the FCC were to be dissolved, maybe the airwaves would descend into porn and violence, who knows? But at some point some Puritan will start a "family friendly" station to shield those "poor, innocent children" from bad words and nature.

If parents can't figure out how to raise kids that might be "harmed" by seeing a naked woman or hearing a few naughty words, then **** 'em, they shouldn't be having kids in the first place. And if *they're* offended or harmed, then they need to crawl out of that bubble they're in and join the real world. Grow the **** up.

So what's the current censorship system in the US? Are all shows censored regardless of what time they're on?
We Brits use a 9pm watershed which is a general agreement that there shouldn't be any swearing, nudity or particularly graphic violence on TV before 9pm. After that, if your kid is still up and watching telly it's your own damn fault. We also have strange rules on things that are totally censored seemingly arbitrarily, not the best of systems.

Here's info about a new bill that was recently introduced to strengthen the FCC's powers:

Full Text of Press Release

And here's the text of the bill:



You know, instead of just introducing a bill to try to save the children, maybe the adults in a household could actually do some parenting. Or maybe they could do something about the advertisements targeted specifically at little kids who aren't old enough to know they're being sold something. The commercials are really what is "indecent".

Yes.

This is madness.

Madness? THIS IS AMERICA!

While I agree, to a point, if little 6 year old Timmy finds the remote, turns on the TV, and sees hardcore gangbang pornography on Channel 7... that probably isn't "the real world" and might be something you want to shield them from until they are older. I agree the FCC is full of feces, but there DOES need to be some body prohibiting the open and public broadcast of things that is damaging to minors.

Someone is going to respond to this by saying "Don't leave the remote on the floor, then." To which I pre-emptively respond "You will forget, or it will fall off the tall table, at least once."

Except there wouldn't be hardcore gangbang pornography on Channel 7 unless that was the societal norm.

What most of you still don't understand is that freedom of ideas equals quality of ideas. If there isn't a market for hardcore porn on channel 7, there won't be.

Clearly, you've never watched Fox.

geezo! this goes back to what i always say! the government should not be writing legislation trying to protect us from ourselves! this is completely a case of "if you don't like it, then don't watch it" or if you don't want your kids watching it, then get a v-chip, or maybe just get rid of the t.v.. i am so sick of the sniveling, i need the government to wipe my own *** for me mentality!

oh, and this was not directed at kirbs.

Normatively, I tend to agree with Kirby and Emon and other libertarians that there is no need for the FCC and the free market solves for "problems" with speech and allows for progress etc. Unlike Kirby, I don't think that the free speech = progress argument is axiomatic and I don't blame other people for not understanding it, but it makes sense to me.

Constitutionally, I can understand the existence of the FCC. Look at the first amendment:



Notice that the First Amendment only says "Congress" and not the "Executive" or "Public Schools." The reason the First Amendment has any application to other branches of the USFG and even state institutions has to do with the Supreme Court has interpreted the intent of the amendment. Obviously this doesn't have to do with the FCC because, as far as I know, Congress legislated the FCC into existence.

Before you criticize me for taking this off topic then, here's why that matters. If you take the First Amendment from a strict constructionist interpretation, then it's clear that much protection of free speech will be lost. And hey, some people support that view of the First Amendment. If you want it to apply to the Executive and states (even if "Congress" can be interpreted strictly to include state legislation, there's still a lot of other political structures in the states with power)---then write a new amendment.

I have a suspicion, though, that those of you making the case that the FCC violates the First Amendment would not support an interpretation of the First Amendment that leads to school mandated prayer, executive orders suspending the ability to criticize the President, etc.

To solve the problem that the strict constructionist interpretation runs into, we can interpret the First Amendment more broadly. The intent of the First Amendment is pretty clear. It doesn't make sense to protect free speech by only restricting congress.

If we begin looking into the intent of the Amendment, though, it becomes pretty damn obvious that "speech" was never intended to include obscenities. "Speech" in the context of the First Amendment, sandwiched between free religion and freedom to lobby, most likely means "expression of idea" specifically and not just any vocalization.

Even with a strict constructionist interpretation of the constitution, the word "speech" has some room for debate. No one on this thread has even considered the question: what is speech? This isn't just a rhetorical question though. I'm really hoping that someone can provide a good definition of it because it's not so clear to me. On the one hand, speech is "something that is spoken; an utterance, remark, or declaration" (Dictionary.com) which would include obscenities. On the other hand, speech is "a form of communication in spoken language, made by a speaker before an audience for a given purpose" (dictionary.com again) which could arguably include obscenities, but mostly implies in this case that the state would not be able to stop someone from communicating with a purpose or impeding on that purpose, but it would allow them to restrict some of the language they use to get at that purpose. You could express the idea that we should reject the President, but you can't say it like this: "F--- the PRESIDENT!" You could say: "Down with the President!" Insofar as the intent of the speech is preserved, it seems that by that definition of speech there is still freedom of speech in the world of the FCC.

And those are just two definitions of "speech."

Another point of interest:

Even if Kirby's hypothetical amendment was rejected, it would be absurd to assume that makes the FCC illegitimate from the Constitutional standpoint.

Many people might reject the amendment on the grounds that the Court already has interpreted the Constitution that way, but they would otherwise support it.

Further, some people support the FCC as a legislative act but not as a Constitutional amendment. In other words, they think that there's no negative restriction in the Constitution that says an institution like the FCC can't exist. But there should also not be a positive requirement that the FCC must exist in the Constitution. The Constitution should be neutral on the question of the FCC and let the institutions that are supposed to represent the popular and national interest decide.

More importantly, if you think free speech improves the quality of ideas, then you've never seen Foxnews.

I can't really disagree with any of those points. I think the first definition of speech is more true to the idea of freedom, and I do not support a constitution that says otherwise. The definition of obscene is far more difficult to apply than is the definition of speech.

The internet makes the FCC irrelevant.

The market take cares of it.