Saying the Constitution wasn't meant to "cripple" government's power to protect children of society from porn and other "obscenity and indecency," conservative media watchdog Morality in Media has ripped the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that sent the Child Online Protection Act back to a lower court yet again.
The group's president, Robert W. Peters, said both this ruling and the Court's 1997 finding that dumped the Communications Decency Act leaned too heavily on screening technology as a less restrictive means to block kids from porn when "[t]he record would seem clear… that screening technology, standing alone… has not been effective in blocking children's access to Internet pornography. To protect children from Internet pornography, both law and technology will be necessary."
Peters said the framers of the Constitution saw the First Amendment in a framework "of ordered liberty – not as a license to publish pornography, to strip naked in public places for the purpose of sexually arousing patrons, or to commercially distribute material harmful to minors without any legal obligation to adopt sensible measures to restrict children's access to the smut."
He added that, while the "secular elite" hold "a radically different view" of that amendment and have every right to hold it, they don't have the right to "enlist accommodating Supreme Court Justices to effectively rewrite the First Amendment by means of specious decisions. The power to amend is reserved to the people and their representatives.
"Admittedly, there is often a fine line between interpreting a Constitutional provision and in effect amending it to reflect the Justices' personal preferences or ideologies, irrespective of the history of a provision, the will of the American people, the Court's own precedent, and common sense," Peters continued. "But if that line no longer exists (as many elitists now brazenly inform us) and Supreme Court Justices are 'at liberty' to interpret the Constitution in any way they please (and, in the process to "sit in judgment" over a wider and wider array of legislative and executive branch functions), then ours is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, as Lincoln so aptly put it. What we have instead is a judicial oligarchy accountable to no one."
