At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish...Americans attend their places of worship more often than do citizens of other developed nations, and describe religion as playing an especially important role in their lives. Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church andstate must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

Sandra Day O'conner in McCreary County vs. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. In an editorial in The Forward, a weekly Jewish newspaper, Leonard Fein strongly suggests that congress ask Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts, how he sees the Supreme Court's tradition on church-state separation, how he sees the necessary balance between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. Fein correctly warns that the omission of questions relating to the separation of church and state represents an "ominous" sign.

But the fact is that neither the court itself nor public opinion can be viewed as settled. School prayer, charitable choice, the proselytizing activities at the U.S. Air Force Academy, even the idea of a wall of separation are matters of intense debate, spurred on by the manifest Christianization of America. And religious views then insidiously spill over into the debates about evolution, stem-cell research, gay rights and more; all these are affected, and many infected, by inappropriate religious argument and by a radical misunderstanding of the First Amendment.

The Parents Television Council (PTC) suggests an organization billing itself as "nation’s most influential advocacy organization protecting children" would care about the interests of children. Not if they're black or poor though. They recently filed an indecency complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about ABC Network's pre-recorded airing of Live 8: A Worldwide Concert Event -- a recent series of concerts and events across the world staged to highlight the problem of global poverty.

While ABC time delayed the broadcast, and bleeped out almost everything, including the contrived, expletive laced greeting by the children's author/Kabbalah devotee pop superstar known as Esther or Madonna, they missed an expletive.

Nonetheless, Live 8 declared the event a success:

LIVE8 was wonderful and devastatingly effective. The figures announced today are not simply cold numbers.

They mean 10m people alive because you danced for life.

They mean 20m children in school because we played our guitars.

5m orphans taken care of because we sang for joy.

600,000 people every year will not now die of malaria.

The list of excellence goes on. The list of lives stretches to the future.

You did this.

Not the PTC though. Instead of rejoicing with the rest of the planet, PTC has chosen to focus on the East Coast airing of The Who’s “Who Are You,” containing the terribly offensive word. Hopefully there are more parents who are teaching their children to be grateful they aren't starving, suffering from malnutrition or trying to figure out what they can do to help end poverty.

From the sympathetic mouth of Tim Winter, executive director of the PTC:

This kind of language does not belong on network television, particularly when so many children are in the audience. The networks and the FCC must understand that the public will not tolerate this continued abuse of the public airwaves. The television networks must abide by the indecency law and the FCC must vigilantly enforce the law.

And this serves as yet another example of why the Senate needs to follow the lead of the House and vote to increase the indecency fines. The financial penalties for violating the law must no longer be a reasonable cost of doing business.

Aren't you feeling better about the world, parents? Thank the PTC!

I could go further and discuss the cases that touch on pornography and obscenity, also part of our moral ecology. For decades, communities in America have tried to shore up common decency, have tried to guard their collective moral capital, by regulating smut. Congress has likewise responded to Americans’ moral sensibilities by attempting to regulate broadcast media and the Internet. But time and again over the past generation America’s communities and Congress have run up against a Supreme Court intent to side against the American people and with the pornographers. The Court’s doctrine has been that virtually all efforts to regulate smut run afoul of the First Amendment, which the Court says protects all individuals’ “freedom of expression.”

Senator Rick Santorum, the junior United States senator from Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, and the third-highest-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate in an excerpt, A Perfect Storm from It Takes a Family. It would be frightening if this criticism of the Supreme Court’s appreciation of the First Amendment came from a disaffected journalist, but form a United States Senator, is simply appalling. A man who has done everything in his privileged position of power to change the Constitution lacks the moral authority to determine decency.

In an interview with Fox News, Santorum said:

…every church has a ruling council of some sort that defines what the faith is. And, you know, my feeling is that I have a right as a Catholic politician to uphold the values that I believe are important to me, and important, that I believe, for this country. And I think in this case they're consistent.

But I think it's important to have moral leaders speak out. I mean, that's their right, to speak out and to let politicians, as well as every other American, know what they believe the moral imperatives are for our society.

The Senator is attempting to have it both ways. The First Amendment is not designed to accommodate only what Rick Santorum believes is appropriate. His religious beliefs should not impact those who do not ascribe to them, any more than he should be forced to look at “pornographic” images he has the right and capability to refrain from. Further, his attempt to construct a speech hierarchy -- to distinguish among speech that is written versus imagery is an affront to every artist, photographer, singer, musician, performance artist, mime and on and on and on...

But you may have noticed that in pornography the words aren’t really the point, are they? “Speech” implies words, rationally intelligible discussion and argument, communication. Pictures also can be “worth a thousand words,” of course: Sometimes images are central to a political or social cause. But America’s huge porn industry is not about political debate; it is not about the communication of ideas. It’s about the commercial production of objects of titillation for profit. Based on the text of the Constitution, the courts should have recognized a hierarchy of protected “speech,” with political speech and writing receiving the greatest constitutional protection, commercial speech less protection, and mere titillation the least of all. Yet in the topsy-turvy world of the new court-approved morality, limits on political speech like the recently passed McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill are just fine, but congressional restrictions on Internet pornographers are seen as violating the First Amendment and are therefore struck down.

Thankfully, Mr. Santorum is merely a Senator and neither an artist nor a Supreme Court Justice. America, is stronger and smarter than that, one hopes.

On the issue of the Supreme Court, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has constructed an overview of free press issues on record by Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts.

We are deeply concerned that the publicity surrounding these unauthorized modifications has caused the game to be misrepresented to the public and has detracted from the creative merits of this award winning product.

Paul Eibeler, Take-Two's President and Chief Executive Officer following the conclusion of an Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) investigation into the latest installment of its signature product, Grand Auto Theft: San Andreas.

Of all the ironies in the world, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose husband taught children the world over what oral sex is, is partly responsible for calling on the Federal Trade Commission last week to investigate the video game, Grand Auto Theft: San Andreas.

Today, the ESRB changed the rating from "Mature 17+" (M) to "Adults Only 18+" (AO) after a sexually suggestive scene that had been created by the game's developer, Rockstar Games, (which is owned by Take-Two Interactive), was uncovered by modders – fans who make modifications to enhance the game.

Although Rodney Walker, a spokesman for Rockstar Games, claims that the original sexually suggestive scene was indeed created by the company, and that "hot coffee mod," an unauthorized third party modification that alters the retail version of the game “unlocked” it, he ridiculously compared the situation to an artist painting over a canvas, accusing “hackers” of creating a program that “scratches the canvas to reveal an earlier draft of the game.”

In what is more likely a legal nudge, nudge, wink , wink, Rockstar also warned that they were considering legal action against any company (not individual) that help game players change the content. In the past, gaming companies have encouraged modders for perpetuating the relevance of their titles.

After a thorough investigation, we have concluded that sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs of all three platform versions of the game (i.e., PC CD-ROM, Xbox and PS2).

Thus spake Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB. What’s more incredible than anything else is that Hillary Clinton, Paul Eibeler and Patricia Vance, find a scene depicting nudity offensive, yet the unadulterated violence, bloodlust and mayhem that constitutes the rest of the game is deemed okay for sale to kids.

Wal Mart and Target are among retailers who yesterday said they would no longer carry the current version of the game, while Rockstar clamored to damage control by promising a release of a version that included no sex, just tons and tons of violence, which neither retailer, it seems, minds peddling to our kids.

The financial repercussions are not to be sniffed at either, according to the New York Times.

The company said it expected net sales of $1.26 billion to $1.31 billion for the year, down from an earlier forecast of $1.3 billion to $1.35 billion. The company said it expected earnings of $1.05 to $1.12 a share, down from an earlier forecast of $1.40 to $1.47 a share.

The decision to change the game's rating came after the close of the market. But in after-hours trading, shares of Take-Two Interactive tumbled more than 6 percent.

Thank you Hillary, Patricia Vance and Paul Eibeler. America will rest safer tonight knowing that morons like you are claiming to protect our children. The lessons in political expediency, greed and hypocrisy will prove most valuable.

Not everyone is sypathetic to the plight of New York Times columnist, Judith Miller, who was sent packing to a jail rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources. The New York Times, in an editorial stated:

By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order.

This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King. Frequently, it falls to news organizations to uphold this tradition. As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1972, "The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring to fulfillment the public's right to know."

However, William Betz in Buzzflash shares the view of many, who recognize the First Amendment implications of Judith Miller's plight, but don't see Miller in quite the same martyr-like light.

Our hearts must bleed for Judith Miller, who is more famous as a stenographer for Ahmed Chalabi than as a legitimate reporter. Now she's off to jail, poor girl. Remember, it was Miller who, in concert with her masters at the Times, qualifies hands-down as the enabler of the millennium, at least so far. She was spoon-fed lies by the disaffected Iraqi criminal and dutifully reported those lies as fact, supporting the false claims of Bush & Co. that there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Saddam wanted nothing more than to use them against America. What a load of hooey.

Why a fiction writer was permitted to transcribe far-fetched stories and publish them on the front page of the "newspaper of record" is a mystery that may never be resolved.

Still, the newspaper's executive editor had the gall to stand outside the courthouse when Miller was sent to jail today, and to continue to mouth his pious platitudes about the First Amendment and the duty of the press to protect its sources. He might be properly reminded that the first duty of the press is to report the news, not fiction, and that factual accuracy is the essence of the news. It is clear that if it weren't for Miller and Novak and those of their ilk, there might have been more truth told about the Bush administration's fraudulent reasons for planning the invasion of an unarmed country, and hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved.

First Amendment lawyer and scholar Robert Corn-Revere, principle author of
Implementing a Flag Desecration Amendment to the U.S. Constitution a report released by the First Amendment Center, focuses on the history of flag desecration in the United States, and wonders whether the latest attempt by congress represents an end to the controversey...or a new beginning.

Two important Supreme Court decisions striking down flag-desecration laws as violations of the First Amendment — Texas v. Johnson in 1989 and United States v. Eichman in 1990 — set off an emotional national debate about whether to amend the U.S.Constitution. That debate continues today as one of the most polarized disputes in the nation’s history. Those proposing a constitutional amendment argue passionately about the need to restore the government’s ability to protect our unique national symbol. Opponents assert with equal force that doing so would elevate an emblem of freedom over its substance.

A must read for anyone who stands on either side of this issue, although especially relevant for the families of loved ones who have fought and died in support of the freedoms America represents, such as the right to dissent.

A July 4th editorial in Utah's The Daily Herald expresses appropriate shock and disdain at Senator Orin Hatch's flag amendment proposal, which seeks to modify the Bill of Rights. This from a man who less than 1% of Republicans thought could or should be President. If Hatch ever wondered why!!!

Fortunately for free speech, the Supreme Court has not suffered the peculiar intellectual disconnect that leads Sen. Hatch and others to distinguish between expressive words and expressive acts. The court correctly recognizes flag protest not as speech per se but as what may be called speech per quod -- which is to say, it amounts to speech -- and properly subjects it to free-speech analysis under the First Amendment.

The same logic that would validate one's act of waving a flag enthusiastically in a parade to convey a patriotic message also validates the protester's burning of a flag to express objections to American politics or policy.

The only difference is that in the first example, Sen. Hatch approves of the message and thus supports the act. In the second he rejects the message and would make the act a crime.

The bottom line now becomes clear: Notwithstanding all the fine
words about core American ideals, sacred symbols and the like, the primary effect of Sen. Hatch's amendment is the suppression of dissent.

So long as the constitutional right to burn effigies of corrpupt politicians isn't outlawed, Senator Hatch might inspire all sorts of speech he never intended.