Tim Lee

Floridians’ Tax Dollars at Work Fighting Smut

Ars reports on an important case down in Florida:

The defense against the obscenity charges will focus, in part, on the suggestion that interest in group sex fails the community standards test. Google search trends will be used to demonstrate that, except for brief periods near Thanksgiving, searches for “orgy” consistently outrank attempts to find information about “apple pie” in Florida . The rest of the year, orgy searches are closer in frequency to what might be expected to be a common activity in Florida, “surfing.” An astute reader at Slashdot also recognized that, among Floridian Internet users, “boobs” has built and then expanded a lead over surfing during the past three years.

Personally, I find the legal concept of “obscenity,” and the notion that obscenity rules could pass First Amendment muster, to be baffling. I can’t imagine what “compelling state interest” could trump the plain language of the First Amendment to allow the censorship of sexually explicit content consumed by adults in the privacy of the home.

June 24, 2008 | Comments |

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