Shut up!
At least that's what this Dissident Voice writter said. Robert Rivkin, San Francisco based author of GI Rights and Army Justice, is actually arguing that he would rather give up some of his own privileges of free speech in order to stop the madness of campaign ads. He wants to create a constitutional amendment that would ban the airing of politically motivated advertisements altogether.
As an advocate of free speech, I find it hard to agree with Rivkin's proposition. But I have to wonder if some of the political ads aired on television today would stand up under obscenity laws.
The Supreme Court has found that, when used in the context of the First Amendment, the word "obscenity" means material that deals with sex. I do believe that there has been an increase in the amount of sex-talk in the media, especially as it refers to the differences in a marriage between homo's and hetero's.
In a legal context, obscenity scrutinized by the "Miller test ". That is to says that sexual content is judged on:
- Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the purient interest,
- Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
- Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or social value.
I don't know about the "average person", but I am patently offended whenever a politician misleads or lies, especially when it is in the name of protecting their own image or destroying that of a political opponent.
Considering the fact that political ads are notoriously one-sided, I don't see how they are of any real artistic, literary, political or social value. Especially when the air time that they consume could be dedicated to far more entertaining and education programming such as Dancing with the Stars.
Perhaps Rivkin is on the right track here.
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