We'll be right up front about it. Horror movies have never held any appeal, perhaps because in our early days, like radio, they left so much more to viewers' imaginations than today's 3-D, multicolor graphic dismemberments, eruptions and explosions.
On one hand, the Supreme Court's Monday ruling blowing up California's law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to those under 18 makes perfectly consistent free speech sense. And fits with the ongoing strongly free speech standards of the Roberts court.
As a member of the media, whose lifeblood is freedom of speech, we cherish the ability to express, encourage discussion and, in this era of hyper-partisanship, sometimes offend segments. Hopefully.
In a previous life as a news reporter striving to cover the sometimes harsh, even brutal and crude reality of a world we were assigned to accurately depict, we often clashed with the granny rules of print newsrooms where well-meaning, usually elderly editors in air-conditioned offices could....
...rule on what words, phrases or images might offend delicate reader sensibilities at their next breakfast -- be it street or war gore, crude language or a graphic photo. The safest decision, of course, was not to go there, as we learned later as an editor.
With colleagues we pushed the envelope at times, concocting ridiculous euphemisms (one favorite was 'eight-letter barnyard epithet' to circumvent the profession's self-imposed restrictions on what a famous defendant kept yelling in a courtroom).
We argued that by seeking to protect readers from a sometimes disturbing or repugnant reality we were unintentionally distorting the true reality we had vowed to publish. In fact, that distorting dismay erupted right in this space after last winter's awful Tucson shootings when a photograph of the crime scene including a covered, unidentified fatality was removed because one ancillary editor said he felt offended.These are not easy decisions. They shouldn't be. Nor, despite the 7-2 vote, does it appear to have been easy for the Supreme Court.
Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said, "No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."
In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the court's more liberal members, argued in favor of California's restrictions, signed in 2005 but never enforced.
"What sense," Breyer asked, "does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?"
