Andy Chalk said:
I must respectfully disagree. If there was any reasonable case for game sales to be regulated under commerce laws, at least one of the many individuals and states who have attempted to impose such laws would have taken a shot at it
By that logic, the fact that games were challenged under first amendment grounds should mean that there is some reasonable argument they're not art.
I go back again to the Whitewater scandal and the fact that they had a solid case against the Clintons but instead chose to make it about sex in the White House. You're relying on the faulty logic that humans will take the most reasonable course, something that can be demonstrated false pretty readily.
and not just with games, but with books, music, movies, literally every medium that has ever gone to market.
No surprise, these media also rubbed against free speech, even though that's logically a bad plan of attack. I would repeat, it's almost like people don't always make the right decisions.
Another tangential news example, but did you know that the man who shot and killed abortion provider George Tiller had attempted to sabotage the abortion clinic the week before she shot Tiller in Tiller's church?
Logically, this man should have been in jail by the time he commited that murder. Whether or not you agree with the law, there was a federal protection in place that should have kept him from killing George Tiller.
I think it's only reasonable, therefore, to assume that since there was a reasonable case to keep Roeder in jail, George Tiller must still be alive. Now, you can choose to ignore subsequent evidence of his death, or you can reside solely in the realm of what's logical.
What is logical and what we as humans do are not always in step and it is wholly unreasonable to assert that just because it hasn't been attempted means there's no good grounds for it. Hell, it took Republicans 40 years to come up with an idea to backdoor Roe v Wade legally.
As for whether or not games shouldn't be curtailed, this is a nonpoint but I don't think they should be regulated either. However, whether you or I think they should is meaningless in the case of whether they can, and under what protections. Brown v EMA was pretty specific on why it overturned the law as-is, so we might actually see a commerce argument come forth. If obscenity laws were a thing of the past when Rock music was around, we might have seen it then. But the fact is, we saw rock stations, stores and businesses shut down for being "obscene."
I don't know how old you are or what the scene was like in Canadia, but it wasn't that much before I was born that people were still fighting for the rights of books and music in the country where the First Amendment applies. Seriously. You still saw radio stations being shut down or sanctioned, book and music stores come under legal attack, etc in the mid-seventies, and maybe later. Nowadays, most censorship is corporate in the first place.
My best guess as to why we keep seeing people try and tackle the First Amendment is that it's easier to rally people on obscenity and moral outrage.
