Ugh. Apart from being one of the most rhetoric-filled “news”-casts on TV or XM radio, Linda Vester’s Dayside is also one of the slowest updated shows on the web. As a result, I can’t find a reference to today’s guest, who was an advocate for censoring television.
The argument of this person, a male book author (I’m listening in the car, so I don’t get any on-screen prompts with names or anything), was that the Constitution does not provide a right for citizens to be able to view pornographic programming - in this case, referring to an ad showing Paris Hilton writhing around on the hood of a car. He contends that it is our duty to impose moral standards to which broadcasters can comply so that our children aren’t affected by lewd or violent content in the media.
Well, that’s utter crap all around, and I’ll tell you why.
First of all, the Constitution does provide for my right to watch whatever lascivious content I watch. It’s called the 9th amendment, the concise text of which I will quote here for the purpose of illuminating what may be one of the more important amendments of the next decade:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
To clarify, the rights listed in the Constitution are not the only ones that you have. In fact, we must have a presumption of liberty - an agreement that all men are free to do as they please, provided it does not restrict the liberty of others - that would grant citizens any right not specifically contracted under the Constitution.
To debate this briefly, some might suggest that this implies that “murder” is a right that people possess, since it is not listed in the Constitution. They would be wrong for two reasons. First, murder is illegal by laws passed under the constitution. Second, even if there weren’t explicit laws, it would still not be a right that a person could retain since it clearly violates the victim’s right to live.
It’s intersting how I keep coming back to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the state of nature in regard to fundamental rights in this country. But that’s a topic I should settle on and develop fully rather than this quick spouting as a result of an editorial program.
From the rights provided to me by the Constitution you can derive that my right to see Paris Hilton slither nearly naked on a car hood obviously outweighs your concerns about your children possibly turning on the TV and catching it by chance because you weren’t monitoring their behavior. Let’s not substitute my rights with laws that let you off the hook for being a decent parent.
And even while I write this, I’ll agree that moral standards these days are a little skewed. Let’s be realistic about re-engineering morals, though. People have obviously been having sex for a very. long. time. There is nothing wrong with it and our culture is moving toward an age where sex is understood and mainstream. Remember all of those nude sculptures around old buildings? They stopped making those in the Victorian era, and we have yet to recover from this interpretation of the word “lewd”. It’s absurd.
It’s like suddenly making spigots taboo. We’ll all use them in our houses, but won’t talk about them to each other on the street. And if they show the edge of a spout on TV, it’s considered pornographic, but we see the big nozzle in our showers every stinking day. Stupid.
Now I’ll agree that we need to “save the children” from some sex at both angles. First off, child exploitation should be illegal. Why? (Why ask why? Because everything has to have rational justification, not just a gut reaction to what sounds right or wrong.) Children do not have the experience with sex to make responsible decisions about it, and they need to be protected.
Likewise, children are impressionable, and it might be good to keep them away from such content that would inadvertently force them to make those decisions. Maybe we shouldn’t be showing our kids pornography on TV, but it’s not the government’s place to guide our children morally. That is the right and responsibility of the children’s parents. The government should do everything they can to help parents provide their own set of morals to their children. That’s why rating systems like the V-Chip and ESRB and MPAA ratings are ok by me. It’s the best a parent is going to get without screening the media themselves first.
So to recap - Censoring TV by federal mandate is bad. Parents should be aided in applying their own morality to their rearing of children and not required by the government to apply some communally-accepted standard - as if 300 million people could all agree on a single standard. Moreover, the Constitution protects my right to watch whatever the heck I want, just as much as it protects your right to turn that stinking TV off and stop listening to the propaganda of Fox News.
