"Protecting" Children: A Pretext for Government Censorship
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Despite this most hallowed of constitutional imperatives, both Congress and the states have found numerous occasions upon which to pass such laws, and continue to do so today. Nowhere is this tendency more poignantly exemplified than in the arena of sexually explicit speech. At present, laws restricting speech that is "obscene," "indecent," or "patently offensive" remain a significant part of our legal landscape, and persist in threatening our ability to freely express ourselves about sex and obtain information about sex-related issues. Laws regulating sexually explicit speech have undergone a series of transformations over the course of the Twentieth Century, significantly expanding the rights of adults to view, create, and sell sexually explicit works. Pornography, for example, is no longer considered "obscene," since it actually holds some "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Indeed, it is extremely rare nowadays for a person to be prosecuted for obscenity. Nevertheless, lawmakers have found more creative and indirect ways
To do so, the government would have to show that exposure to such materials actually caused minors some kind of identifiable harm. United States, ruled that sexually explicit speech-even pornography-does not rise to the level of obscenity. By 1973, the makeup of the Supreme Court had changed significantly, and as a result, so did its determination of what constitutes obscene speech. The Child Online Protection Act With their efforts to "clean up" the Internet having been thwarted by the Supreme Court, Congress went back to the drawing board in an attempt to fix the constitutional difficulties presented by the CDA. Correlations can be established between practically anything, because a correlation simply shows some kind of reciprocal relation, no matter how tenuous. First, the state has an interest in protecting its minors from harm. COPA infringes upon parent's rights by prohibiting or chilling certain instances of sexually explicit online speech that many parents may wish for their minor children to see. It is clear that the real reasons behind the government's attempts to keep minors in the dark about sex are moral, and not scientific ones. Under strict scrutiny, the government carries the burden of showing that their professed interest is a compelling one, and that the specific regulation they have employed is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. Under this test, the Court gives a high degree of deference to the state legislature, whereby it presumes the constitutional validity of the state regulation. In fact, under most circumstances the only minors who will come across sexually explicit material are those who are deliberately looking for it, and they will obtain it with or without their parents' consent-and in spite of government prohibitions.
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Acceptance Essays
