Among many theories over the years regarding the
origin of the phrase 'Blue Laws', one persists that these edicts were written on blue
paper. Whatever the rational for their color, there was little doubt about their motives.LENNY BRUCE,
WHERE ARE YOU WHEN WE NEED YOU?
by sonya hammond
"Whoever
would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of
speech..."
Benjamin
Franklin, 1722
Among many theories over the years regarding the
origin of the phrase 'Blue Laws', one persists that these edicts were written on blue
paper. Whatever the rational for their color, there was little doubt about their motives.
The Puritans, who had fled England in order to gain the freedom to practice their religion as they chose, on their arrival here promptly enacted legislation to curtail any freedoms in which everyone else in their New World colony might have the temerity to indulge.
The list of Blue 'shalt nots' on Sundays included engaging in the pursuit of dancing, shows, books and sports, not to mention [and they didn't] sex .
Further prohibitions, irrespective of the day of the week, encompassed anything else considered morally offensive from the Puritan point of view.
While the idea of any group, religious or otherwise, declaring card-playing or kissing one's wife a crime may strike us today as inconceivable, consider the principal factor enabling this intrusion into 17th Century colonial American life:
Having somehow survived the Puritans [although not, one imagines, without a good deal of subversive 'criminal' activity], the U.S. approaches the 21st Century free to deluge Sundays with sports or a broad range of alternatives, many of which would not pass Puritan scrutiny, thanks to our founding fathers who actually understood the concept of freedom.
We are, however increasingly surrounded by groups determined to impose their own values on everyone, a process now tinkering dangerously with our constitutional right to free speech.
If this latest attempt to censor the dissemination of information were simply an effort by some over-zealous religious sect to delete any mention of body parts from over-the-counter medication packaging, we could dismiss it as too outrageous to consider seriously.
Even an effort by one mentally-challenged and politically bankrupt Governor to limit communication in his State to English can inject a few chuckles into our disbelief. As yet, the content of speech in California is still unchallenged, but give Pete Wilson time ... at the moment he's preoccupied with dismantling Affirmative Action.
Unfortunately, the most dangerous attack on our right to unregulated communication comes from one of the more rampantly misguided [in the strictest literal sense of the word] Congresses that the Neo-Puritans of this nation have ever managed to elect.
It is past time for Fear; we are going to have to scream our heads off about this one.
Spurred to new heights of arrogant censorship by Compuserve's recent intimidation by a former W.W.II participant with a penchant for burning books and non-Aryans, the 104th U.S. Congress has arbitrarily endowed the Internet with Media status, thereby inviting regulation of what passes through it.
It may too easily follow that a Senate Committee could determine whether or not transmission of your Great-Aunt Bertha's fruitcake recipe over your modem to a network had obscure obscene and/or homosexual [gasp] implications. Once your message fell into the bottomless pit of objectionable speech from which an innocent public would be protected by law, you would be guilty of a punishable crime.
The consequences could be staggering. Prisons would bulge with hordes of offenders exceeding limitations on suspiciously colorful metaphor. Jail cells would overflow with perpetrators of indiscreet anatomical references. Court schedules would back up as congressionally defined 'suggestive' language inspired verbal injury cases and lucrative new litigation opportunities.
This is not to deny that true 'pornography' exists in cyberspace. Someone's definition of it will continue to proliferate somewhere, somehow, in some form, on some medium, no matter how it is legislated. The idea of it has existed from the moment Adam and Eve put on their fig leaves, and what constitutes 'obscene' or 'indecent' has been argued ever since.
No rational person would argue against protecting children from the murkier waters of the Net, a problem that should be solved by technology and parental responsibility. But the rest of us, at least those of us who still understand the Constitution, did not anoint our legislators as parental surrogates.
Censorship of the world's first international free exchange of information in order to protect it from material considered offensive by opportunistic politicians is the most dangerous solution since Hitler discovered one he considered 'Final'.
The world may not be outraged if 'alt.sex.fetish.earwax' or 'www.graphics.com/senators/navels.html' are yanked from the Net, but all things considered, it should be.
© sonya hammond 1996