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by ceejayoz
361 days ago
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What counts as obscene has notably not been defined. "Contemporary community standards" and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" are so vague as to be useless. Whose community? Which standards? How many people have to be offended by something? How many people have to find value in it for it to be serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity > In 1957, two associates of acclaimed poet Allen Ginsberg were arrested and jailed for selling his book "Howl and Other Poems" to undercover police officers at a beatnik bookstore in San Francisco. Eventually the California Supreme Court declared the literature to be of "redeeming social value" and therefore not classifiable as "obscene". Because the poem "Howl" contains pornographic slang and overt references to drugs and homosexuality, the poem was (and is) frequently censored and confiscated; however, it remains a landmark case. The Simpsons was considered concerningly off-color in the 1990s; I remember quite a bit of pearl clutching about it, to the point of them getting into a bit of a feud with George and Barbara Bush. Now it's positive family values TV of "serious artistic value". Most of what's on Pornhub is considered pornography but not obscenity currently, but that could change on a dime. |
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Even then, it wasn't like the average person was arguing for it to be banned by obscenity rules. The spat between H.W. Bush and the Simpsons was a comment he made, saying "We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." It's not like Bush was actively pushing for The Simpsons to be taken off the air or anything along those lines.
Honestly, I think it makes more sense to have some kind of standard like a reasonable person/common person/contemporary community standard when trying to define something like "obscenity". Not making an argument of what kind of law to pass with that, just stating I don't think having some etched in stone standard would ultimately be good in the end for any kind of law related to such content. Ultimately its the same to me in terms of laws that would otherwise try and regulate certain kinds of commerce or whatever, with extremely rigid definitions that can't keep up with changes to the marketplace. That we might find something like The Simpsons potentially detestable in the 90s but otherwise fine today is an example for such a standard with flexibility, not against it IMO. We wouldn't want the law to be bound to whatever people specifically thought was "obscenity" in 1850 to still hold legal weight today.