In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children. The law’s greatest champion, California Senator Leland Yee, shook his fist at the Court, cursed those meddling kids, and vowed to return.
In the majority opinion, Justice Scalia wrote that, while a state does have an interest in protecting children from harm, it does not possess a “free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”
Also, in other news, video games are still art.
Reading the ruling itself, as one will do, all I can think of is why the same arguments somehow don’t apply to porn. It’s hard to say that ideas, expressions, cause material harm to children, and yet entire industries are built on the mistaken assumption that they do.
The elder generation said the same thing about those kids and their music, those kids and their dancing, those kids and their television, and those kids and their internet. Probably said the same thing about those kids and their cave paintings. Video games are just another front in the war the old wage against the young.
Understanding is a battlefield.