A new bill introduced in Congress last month wants to allow parents to take the law into their own hands every time their children are exposed to material that they feel is objectionable for minors to see, hear or read.
The Parent’s Empowerment Act, introduced by Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-California) on April 28, would let minors, or parents on their behalf, sue producers of entertainment products that are deemed “harmful to minors.”
“Each and every day, millions of children access the Internet and other interactive entertainment products,” said Congressman Hunter in a press release regarding the bill. “As this number increases, more and more of our nation’s children are unexpectedly and tragically exposed to pornography. Like most Americans, I firmly believe that those responsible for the current threat of obscene material and its ill-effects should be punished for distributing such material to our children.”
Yet the bill targets far more than adult entertainment – the language of bill opens to door for civil suits for those involved in the creation, distribution and sale of mainstream entertainment products such as R-rated movies, rap music, and shock jocks like Howard Stern.
And the bill is talking about not just the Internet and interactive entertainment products; movies, music heard on the radio or purchased on a CD, and even books are specifically identified.
As the bill is currently written, that means that if a parent finds out that their teenage son listens to rap or Howard Stern in the morning, they can sue for $10,000 for every sexual reference or fart joke their child hears. And, of course, victims would be entitled to compensatory relief and legal fees.
The bill requires two conditions to be satisfied before a civil suit can be filed: 1) A reasonable person would expect that minors could gain access to the material in question, and 2) The minor is likely to “suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare,” as a result of exposure to the material.
“Objectionable material” means anything pornographic, and in a twist on the current standards for defining obscenity, anything that “community standards” finds objectionable for minors.
That means even something that is not obscene for adults, might be obscene for children and brings mainstream material into the bill’s domain. The bill specifically named exposure to anything designed “prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.”
However, if a minor sees, hears or reads objectionable material on an entertainment product that is owned or possessed by the minor’s parent or guardian, and an act of that parent or guardian led to the minor’s exposure to said material, any civil liability would be waived.
The bill further modifies current obscenity standards by stating that a reasonable person would find that the material, “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value for minors sufficient to overcome the pernicious effect of that material.”
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a book that graphically deals with sex, was originally banned in the United States, but after a thirteen-year legal battle, the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that the book offered enough literary value to overcome the obscenity charges.
Yet would they rule that the book had enough literary merit to overcome a father concerned about the moral damage caused by his fourteen-year-old daughter reading Miller’s describing a "whore's cunt" as a metaphor for civilization?
The bill has been moved to the House Judiciary Committee for consideration.
