Video Game Violence: What About The Parents?!

Being a huge proponent of freedom of speech AND a believer that videogames, television, advertising and films can negatively distort people’s perceptions of reality, you would think I would be torn about yesterday’s 7-2 decision by the Supreme Court striking down a law that prevents minors from buying violent videogames. But I’m not. The court got it wrong, pure and simple.

The issue before the Supreme Court was a California law that makes it illegal for retailers to sell violent videogames to minors. The law defines “violent” as games that depict the “killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.” It carried fines up to a $1,000.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia struck down the law, saying that the First Amendment applies to “entertainment,” and thus, videogames are afforded the same degree of protection as books and movies. He conceded that states do have a legitimate interested in protecting children, but he held that “does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.” And since “disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression,” the law had to be struck down. Indeed, by way of comparison, he noted that television and children’s books throughout history have depicted violence:

“Certainly the books we give children to read — or read to them when they are younger — contain no shortage of gore. Grimm's Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed.”

If we were talking about adults, then I would agree with the court. Free speech is one of our most vital freedoms. It is the way we determine which ideas have value and which don’t. It is how we test our beliefs. And our society is more than strong enough to allow idiots to present stupid, disgusting or wrong ideas without fear that our country will collapse.

But we’re not talking about adults, and that’s where the court went wrong.

The court should have upheld the law for one simple reason: children do not have freedom of speech rights. If they did, then public education would be virtually impossible as children would have a right to decide which ideas they wanted to be exposed to and which they didn’t. Similarly, parenting would become impossible whenever the state got involved, for example at a child custody hearing, as children would have all the rights of adults.

Justice Thomas made this point in his dissent where he noted that the First Amendment does not “include a right to speak to minors without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.” In other words, children's rights get exercised through their guardians, and the state is well within its rights to say that children may not engage in free speech, or commerce, or gun ownership or anything else without the approval of those guardians.

Putting this another way, the court’s question of whether disgust is a significant enough basis to restrict the child’s freedom of speech rights is a false premise because the child has no such rights in the first place. Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer (the other dissenter) backed this point when he noted that the state was not trying to bar the minor having such material, it only required the approval of a guardian:

“The statute prevents no one from playing a video game, it prevents no adult from buying a video game, and it prevents no child or adolescent from obtaining a game provided a parent is willing to help.”

Breyer also made the less principled, but quite logical point that since the court still forbids children from buying pornography, the court has created an incredible hypocrisy here:

“What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?”

The dissent is correct. This was a mistake.

And let me be clear, I’m not siding with the “what about the children” crowd. That’s sophist nonsense used to hide true motivations and is usually advanced by busybodies who want to rule over others lives. What I’m talking about here is respecting the right of parents/guardians to make decisions regarding their children. If this law had tried to ban children from being given such material, then I would have supported the court’s decision. But it didn’t. All it did instead was try to prevent retailers from circumventing the rights of guardians/parents to make decisions for their children. That is well within the constitution and no rights are violated by such a statute.

How can we legitimately tell parents that raising kids is their responsibility when we take away the state’s power to help parents enforce those decisions.