Last week saw a great decision from a US Federal Court. In the UK the next sentence I am going to write would be unthinkable but several US-based commentators have mentioned it so I will. Each of the judges in the case was appointed by a Republican President.
The Court upheld a state-based mandate to carry out age verification for porn sites. In essence it demolishes the original Ashcroft decision which was very poorly argued by the then Government.
Without getting into the specifics of the State law in question, the judgement is worth reading anyway.
Here are two of many nuggets:
“the record is replete with examples of the sort of damage that access to pornography does to children”
and
“(the idea that) the invention of the Internet somehow reduced the scope of the state’s ability to protect children…is a dubious principle without support in existing Supreme Court case law.”
Slowly but surely, too slowly but nevertheless still surely, the “Wild West” is being tamed.
All the reactionaries have left are delaying tactics, but then delay is money in the bank for them and money is what makes their world go around.
Desiderata 