Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for July 15, 2011

Classic. My relatives in Europe are always shocked by the American notion that the most horrific violence is perfectly OK, but the slightest hint of sex or nudity is some how destructive.

Somewhere along the line, we got it completely backwards….

…new Fearfest burqas coming to a store near you

Great toon Ruben. It gets the insanity of the Roberts court’s decision exactly right.

And it’s okay to show Scalia, even though he’s an ass with a crack all the way down to Holesville. What’s up with that?

Synchronicity. There’s a lampoon of Chuck E. Cheese on Adam@Home all week this week.

Thanks Judge Scalia, for sparing us from the horrific image of yet another exposed female br***t that might fuel more horrific memories of the horror of br***tfeeding in our infancies. What was God thinking when He designed the mammalian reproductive systems that infest our planet? I,for one, welcome this form of ‘big government.’ Now would you please turn your attention to the utterly disgusting behavior of the primates at the local Zoo. Not only was that big Ape in the corner doing something nasty to himself, when i screamed at him to stop, he flang a bunch of poo at me!! I’ll never be clean again! The horror. The horror…

In my earlier post I referred to God as the creator. I should have referred to the actual creator, Godman. I apologize for this error. Also, I feel conflicted in pointing out that the blonde has an AMAZING pair of ta-ta’s,

I’m having trouble finding Jack Nicholson’s actual words, since he’s been “quoted” in many different variations, but sometime back in the ’70’s he said (something like):“Kiss a tit, you get an X rating. Hack a tit off with a sword, it’s PG.”

This is the harvest brought by the Tea Party and the right wing loonies.

What’s outrageous about all this evil is that this cartoon speaks the truth.

…Air Force pilots are given medals when they drop napalm on villages, but the generals wont let them write *UCK on their airplanes, because that would be obscene.

Actually, the U.S. Constitution, First Amendment, says ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ The amendment was extended to the states by the 14th Amendment. It doesn’t say ‘except in cases of depictions of sex, or violence.’ If you don’t believe in freedom of speech, and obviously many of you don’t, you ought to change the Constitution, not leave it up to confused persons like Justice Scalia.

Anarcissie, we’re specifically dealing with making these materials available to children, which complicates matters. The desire to “Protect the Children” has long been used AND abused to legally restrict things which are freely available to adults. It is illegal to sell hardcore pornography to children. It is illegal to PROVIDE hardcore pornography to children. It is illegal to sell alcohol or cigarettes to children. It is illegal TO PROVIDE alcohol or cigarettes to children. Of course, it is very difficult to completely block access to any of these things from a determined child, but that the law treats these things differently when it comes to kids is not, in essence, unconstitutional.

The California law which the SCOTUS ruled unconstitutional didn’t outlaw the manufacture or publishing of extremely violent videogames, it required people not to sell them to children. Video stores have long had a room in the back where the porn films are displayed, and into which children are not allowed. Could not “Mature” or “Adults Only” videogames not be displayed and sold from a similar area (or the SAME area)? Although videogame ratings are self-imposed and self-regulated by the industry, the ESRB was established in response to Congessional hearings centering on the question of extremely violent videogames (and when those hearings were held, just about the most extreme example available was Mortal Kombat; now we have Grand Theft Auto; ain’t progress grand?).

Children are not allowed to buy tickets to R-rated movies unless they are accompanied by an adult, but it is not illegal for an adult to buy a child a ticket (and accompany that child) to an R-rated movie. A theater may not, under any circumstances, sell a child a ticket to or allow a child admittance to an NC17-rated movie. But motion picture ratings themselves, like videogame ratings, are self-imposed by their industry.

With home viewership, of course, if an adult buys an R-rated movie and allows a child access to it for unsupervised viewing. The same goes for M-17 videogames. (“Adults-only” material may still be different, and if we distinguish between “strong sexual content” and “pornography”, why may there not be a similar distinction made when it comes to violence?)

Of course, what makes any age-threshhold law (whether it’s restricting alcohol, tobacco, “adult entertainment”, or even sexual activity) different from other legally-restricted/prohibited activities is that time is on the side of the one under the restriction. You want to buy that Jack the Ripper 3000 AD videogame? Sure thing! Come back when you’re 18 and I’ll be happy to sell it to you.

@fitzold — I was just pointing out what the Constitution says. Scalia followed the Constitution in the matter of violent video games, but his weaseling about sexual obscenity was logically invalid, regardless of tradition. The people who wrote the Constitution knew all about sex and violence.Progressives, of course, think government is an almost unalloyed Good Thing, and their first response to any problem is to have the government regulate or suppress it, and to hell with the Constitution. Can’t argue with that — it’s a religious faith.Which leads us to the rather humorous irony of the State of California using authoritarian coercive force — ‘violence’, so to speak — to suppress video games which might inspire some teenager to use random coercive force — other violence. It’s like gun control — you send men with guns to take guns away from other men with guns, and you call it ‘peace’.

Again, Anarcissie, we’re not talking about banning the sale and manufacture of the games, we’re talking about not selling them to kids. The law regularly treats children and adults (and by “children” I’m including anything under 18) differently. We can sell all sorts of products to adults that we are not allowed to sell to children, including (but not limited to) hardcore pornography. Graphic sexual content, like graphic violent content, has been expressly stated to fall under the protection of the First Amendment, but there are restrictions placed on making pornography available to minors which have not been ruled unconstitutional.

The First Amendment doesn’t say anything about age, as Scalia noted. His weaseling was around the tradition of suppressing sexual imagery, not just in the case of children, but universally. If you read the decision, you’ll find that he treated poor Uncle Clarence, who did try to introduce some sort of age qualification, with withering scorn. A fun read, not to be missed. See www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf

All that decision says is that you can’t legislate sales of video games any more than you can movies or books or artworks. Parents are still the final arbiter of what game, movies and books their kids can have. I took my boys to a local university’s art museum every few months starting when they were 8 or 9, and got the curator and his staff into conversations. The first time or two they gawked and snickered at the naked statues and nude paintings, then they started talking about the actual artistic merits of the pieces. Unfortunately once they got into high school the desire to be “cool” caused them to start behaving like all the other regressive teenaged boys.

You were close. The actual quote was:“If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG.”

Chuck E. Cheese’s rated R style.