The radio at work was trained to The Buzz, a local talk-radio station, and I heard a good talk show tonight that carried with it some extremely good news — apparently the Supreme Court today upheld a ruling declaring the 1996 Child Pornography Protection Act unconstitutional.
I was extremely happy to hear about this ruling. While I’m sure the CPPA was written with good ideas behind it, it was so incredibly broad in its wording that it could have been used to stifle and outlaw all sorts of works. While there are already many other laws forbidding child pornography, the CPPA went on to declare works that used adults to portay minors as illegal. The declared intent was to try and crack down on situations such as computer artists superimposing a child’s head onto an adults body to create ‘virtual’ child porn that would be legal without the CPPA, because it didn’t actually involve children, or using adults that look young to create ‘pesudo-‘child porn. However, the declaration was written so broadly that going by the letter of the law, it also outlawed everything from recent Academy Award-winning films American Beauty and Traffic to any filmed version of Shakespeare‘s ‘Romeo and Juliet‘ (including either Baz Lurhmann’s recent version or Franco Zeffirelli’s classic version), to many works of art, to documentaries or films invovling child abuse — basically, any number of good and worthwhile works.
This decision, though, declares that the CPPA was too broad in its wording and fell foul of the First Amendment. In my mind, a necessary and accurate ruling, though predictably enough, apparently the right-wing contingents are already frothing at the mouth over this, and John Ashcroft has already been quoted criticizing the Supreme Court’s ruling, saying that, “this morning the United States Supreme Court made our ability to prosecute those who produce and possess child pornography immeasurably more difficult….” One of the more common arguments offered up by those dissapointed by the ruling is that it should be obvious that the government wouldn’t be targeting films like those I mentioned above, so we shouldn’t be worried that technically, they’re included in the CPPA’s definitions. However, because they were covered by the CPPA they were technically illegal, and it would be a very small step for us to end up in a climate where films like those would end up being targeted and outlawed. By striking down the CPPA, the Supreme Court has made an important step in protecting the rights gauranteed to us by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, a step that’s all the more important in todays world were too many people seem all to prepared to voluntarily give up those rights in support of the ‘War on Terror‘ or any other hot-button topic.
In a world where we seem to be all-too-swiftly moving closer and closer to George Orwell‘s 1984 dystopia, complete with Big Brother, it’s nice to see at least some branch of our government helping us to take a collective step back from the brink of the abyss.