This quote comes from a recent CNN.com article reporting that a federal judge struck down a 1998 U.S. law "that makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access "harmful" material."

The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards." The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Elsewhere the law is criticized for violating free speech and being too vague. I have only one question. Does it violate free speech to force proper identification of an individual to view age-appropriate material? Let's put it a different way. Does it violate free speech to force a bar-tender or server to check an id before purchasing alcohol? I think there is a deeper issue here than cnn.com allows us to believe.... In case you didn't know, advertising on the internet is becoming an increasingly popular business. Currently, the logic goes like this. If a site is popular, it gets a lot of "hits" which means many people are going there. Therefore, advertisers want their ads on high traffic sites where all the hits are in hopes of getting mass product exposure. I cannot help but believe that the real concern for website owners is that they will lose hits from people, not just minors, if a age-verification measures were put in place. Free-speech is absolutely not the major concern for anyone involved in this debate. The law never forced anyone to remove their content from the internet, but merely limit their possible audience. In business terms, this is not good. Welcome to consumerism in America. The company's bottom-line masquerading as free-speech. I pray that our country would wake up and open their eyes to this type of rhetoric. Father, help us to have a passion to what we expose our children to, that exceeds our passion for materialistic gain and personal consumption. P.S. - I found this quote equally disheartening.

It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source," a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial brief.

Why is it so unreasonable? Because we allow economic gain to masquerade as free speech.

powered by performancing firefox