Though jeez, some people are really set on holding grudges against people who have advanced the cause fir even broaching the subject. Conservatives: we eat our own.

My computer’s in the shop, and I’ve had to type many of my posts with my iPhone, which isn’t conducive to good spelling

As the kerfuffle at CPAC has made clear, there are some socially conservative groups that aren’t interested in compromise or in being amenable to other conservative viewpoints. It really depends on the group or person that you refer to: there are several small government and libertarian conservatives willing to work with the GOP despite differences of opinion (the conservative movement of the 80s was the result of Frank Meyer’s so-called “fusionism”, after all). There are some people who don’t mind putting aside their differences to work towards policy that they do support, and there are some who don’t: this cuts across boundaries, so I don’t think that you can really say that it is exclusively due to fiscon antipathy towards religion or what have you: I’ve been called a degenerate by enough stiff-necked social conservatives to know that that isn’t the case.

I.e., calling oneself a “libertarian conservative” or a “social conservative” can help me get a better handle on where you’re coming from, but yes, I do think that there is too much fighting over issues that the various camps won’t agree on any time soon, and too little movement on issues that we can gain traction on (that all sides agree on).

rather than a slaveholding Commonwealth of Virginia surrounded by hostile independent states proves my point: a truce was needed to prevent GB or another power from swallowing up the States, or the States from succumbing to war. That priority was more important than settling the dispute over abolitionists and slavers.

3/5s Compromise, to be precise. Kept the country from being divvied up into smaller states, or from getting reconquered by Great Britain.

Maybe, but the fact that even the Catholic Church has depravity occurring under it’s nose is evidence to me persuades me that it might not have. As a parent, I assume that you hold your kids directly responsible for their actions when they do wrong, rather than going on a sing and dance for why culture “made” them that way. Ultimately, people are responsible for their actions, not a concept as elusive as “society”.

Because just to be clear, I think that anyone who holds Chirch leadership responsible for what happened is just as nonsensical as positing that Clinton is personally responsible for what these kids were doing to each other.

you are allowing someone (a board, a director of some bureaucracy, etc) to decide what constitutes “family values” based on non-objective standards. Was “All in the Family” objectionable content? I don’t think so, but it was nevertheless bumped off of its timeslot to allow “family friendly” programming to play. There were several “children’s shows” that positively showcased ideas more disturbing and damaging than the most graphic sex scenes. To me, virtually anything on HBO is preferable to sitcoms that portray sexual looseness as something to be admired, to use one comparison. There are several great artistic and philosophical works that contain graphic material, and society is all the better for having it available to the public (such as 1984). Heck, the Bible itself depicts several disturbing or graphic scenes that, were they written into a play or a book, several parents would want to ban! I don’t even want to think about what havoc could be wreaked by interest groups (for example, gays successfully arguing that portraying a healthy, committed gay couple is “family friendly”).

Even the more benign regime that you describe for the internet (as I understand it, to have a rating board for websites) entrusts a third party with the legitimacy to force websites to put up their rating, and could have the effect of discouraging adults and children alike from viewing websites that have valid and uplifting material. Again I must ask, what would fall under the definition of “objectionable content”? Would sites dedicated to the use of guns come under the umbrella of content inappropriate for children? What about political sites which might recognize a right to self-defense, or otherwise defend some forms of violence? What of sites that are in and of themselves fine, but whose commenters swear in the comment boards? Because I assure you, there are many out there who would see calls to violence (implicit and explicit) as reasons to downgrade a site’s rating. Entrusting the government with such a gargantuan task does nothing to solve the problem: after all, if it’s just a rating, what stops you from going in, esp with a broken and politicized rating system? Furthermore, it allows government a way to delegitimize political speech by assigning political ideas a certain level of respectability: guess who’s political views will come under greater scrutiny? Finally, it allows government to gain a controlling interest in the goings-on of the internet: a potentially lucrative place for government to be.

I’m not too crazy about the status quo, either: I don’t watch cable because it has grown too coarse for my tastes. However, there are options out there: watching TV online is one that I take advantage of, waiting for shows to come out on DVD is another. I strongly believe that parents (and citizens in general) have a right to control what children see at public schools: they are being forced to pay for it, so there is at least some basis for such action. Parents are not being forced to pay for TV or the internet, though, nor are their children being forced to watch TV or go on the internet. Given those facts, and the availability of alternatives out there, there is no basis for government to force their standards (which probably don’t match up with mine) down my throat, or to force businesses to adopt standards that they do not agree with. This is especially so when what you recommend affects not only what children will potentially see, but also what *adults* will potentially see. Good intentions have led the left down the path that they are currently on; conservatives should avoid paying heed to that siren song.

but I believe your point to be valid. That said, the internet is not really analogous to property in this example. I’ll explain why I believe this to be the case point by point:

State/Federal control: Unlike strip clubs, the internet does not lend itself to being regulated by local authorities, but must instead be regulated by state or (God forbid) federal fiat. This presents a problem: state-level agencies are living, breathing entities with their own political power and designs, to a much greater extent than the local zoning board. Such an agency is much more likely to be “captured” by special interests, to chart its own course, and to be much more difficult to control than your local board. While your local board might be decent in managing the goings-on of a city or municipality, it would be disastrous to grant it power over an entire state: it would make it much easier to mask unfair and arbitrary decisions, and much more difficult to levy the forces of democracy against unjust and capricious use of its power. In short, it’s a lot easier to hold accountable something that is local and limited, than it is to monitor something that is statewide and that manages something as extensive as the internet.

Type of regulation: Whereas the local zoning board has limited and accountable control over certain uses of property, a board governing “objectionable content” would in all likelihood regulate a variety of things. The three that come to mind are depictions of violence, profanity, and sexuality: this is far more than what you posit, and would likely increase as time goes on to regulation of “hate speech” and other categories.

Definition: unlike prostitution or a strip club, both of which have relatively clear legal meanings, there is no such objective standard for decency. I assure you that your standard of decency is different from mine, and that mine is different from Ace’s, and that Ace’s is different from streiffs, etc. Given all of the things which have been condemned as “indecent”, from rap music to wearing jeans to church to preaching on the street corner, I imagine that “decency” laws would cover everything under the Sun but what they were originally meant to cover!

Implementation: There is no way to reasonably implement laws on this issue. Besides definitional issues, should these laws extend to what people leave on comment boards, or only to what is written on the main site? Does the intent of the site matter in whether the site is marked down in points, or should it be marked down if it advocates for violence? Is suggestive attire or an implicit (possibly metaphorical) call to violence acceptable? Will the rating of sites change as time goes on? Will site-masters have to submit their sites to the regulating agency to gain clearance to put them on the WWW, or will the feds/state authorities be playing a game of catchup? What will the penalty be if a site refuses to submit to the ratings system? Will aggregators and search engines like Google be ranked at all, or will they be regulated in other ways? In what ways can one appeal a rating that one considers to be erroneous? Will there be clear guidelines for what goes into the ratings system? How would sites that rely on user-generated content be ranked, if at all? The ambiguity behind such a proposal would create new opportunities for lawyers the day it gets implemented, and would likely stifle a good deal of the creative spirit that currently exists in the internet today, were it to be implemented in the US. In the case of a state agency, site owners of smaller sites will either not care, try to opt out of the system for the state, or look for ways around it.

Freedom affected: local zoning for strip clubs only marginally affects property rights and the freedom to screw. The freedom of speech is at play when it comes to this proposal: there is no way to avoid cordoning off speech that could have artistic or philosophical merit under such a proposal, and just as a man does not walk into the “entertainment district” unless he has serious intentions, so too would an internet surfer avoid sites that are marked as bad (particularly if there is a way for the state to notify persons of “bad” sites visited). That’s fine if there’s actually truth in advertising, but there will not be: if government can pervert relatively unambiguous statutes and Constitutional amendments, it can surely pervert something as difficult to interpret as “decency”, and a lot of stuff that is perfectly valid speech will be shoehorned into an “indecent” category, depending on the political winds.

Mission creep: It cannot be disputed that fed intervention would give them a toehold for full control of internet activity of all sorts — something that should emphatically be avoided.

Essentially, it is more analogous to proposing a very far-off zoning board that is not accountable to you, arbitrarily deciding that Redstate, heavy metal sites, and gun training sites should be closer to the pornography site than to the “respectable” parts of the internet. All ideas regarding the internet are imperfect, but that is also the case when it comes to free speech: IMO, the Anti-Federalists did us a great favor when they removed government from being able to regulate speech at all, and we would be wise to do the same when it comes to the internet.

There is no objective definition of pornography, or test for what constitutes the same: the Miller test (the best attempt at a standard that I’ve seen) is still woefully inadequate, and “I know it when I see it” is a terrible standard, for reasons that are obvious. A judge elected in AL covered up some nude statues adorning the AL Supreme Court under the belief that they were indecent: I refuse to allow my freedom of speech to come under the heel of anyone like him, and having known government employees, I highly doubt that they are much more intelligent than said judge. An international treaty would probably make things worse, not better. I imagine that we would have concerns with Chinese web usage, and that China would want our government censoring sites critical of the Chinese government, just as Google did while it operated there. I have heard of no proposal thus far that has adequate safeguards and good enough of definitions to satisfy me, and IMO, regulation of the internet would have tremendous negative impact on our economy and on our freedoms.

that what this teacher did was OK? I, for one, am glad that he is going to jail, and whatever amount of time he’s going for, it isn’t enough. What does that have to do with freedom of expression or Bill Clinton? Of the things that you mentioned, which would you be willing to have a policeman jail people for doing? There are several things (including some that you mentioned) that I think are crass and stupid, but my visceral disgust isn’t sufficient basis for policy which has the end result of depriving people of their money and freedom.

Seriously, Ace, your contention that we shouldn’t be surprised by incidents like this one due to coarsening is just ridiculous: if these were your children servicing other kids in the classroom, you would be shocked, outraged, and the last place you would look to blame would be society. Indeed, I expect that believing that your children would do such a thing is inconceivable to you, and you would be looking for who in their lives did something to make them think that this was a good thing. You would do all of this precisely because you are a good parent. Your reaction would not be to blame Clinton and TV: why, then, would you think that those factors are to blame in this case? It is much more likely that bad parenting, bad teaching, and possibly some sexual abuse was involved in this case. If Clinton/society were involved at all, it was in such a small way relative to those factors as to be hardly worth mention.

As for the clothes laws, I don’t wear my clothes because I’m afraid of a policeman, and I imagine that that’s true of pretty much everyone else. I don’t see an epidemic of naked people springing up all of the sudden simply because we don’t have a law in place, ditto public sex. I don’t really care too much about those laws one way or another, but I don’t see that they are keeping us from a cavalcade of nudity or public sex, either.

Name a single department besides the military which has a traditionalist bent. I cannot think of one. There’s an old axiom that says something to the effect of that most entrenched institutions that start off neutral will inevitably become liberal, and while I think that’s overstating it, there is some truth to it: liberals are Gramscian and can work centralized systems in a way that conservatives will never be able to. It is all too easy to imagine a “board of morality” populated wholly by Clintonian anti-gun soccer mom types, leftists priests, and the odd Mike Huckabee here and there for “balance”. Even if there were an objective, consistent view of what is decent for conservatives (there isn’t), even if such decency were possible to enforce consistently (it isn’t) and even if I acknowledged the legitimacy of government controlling what my eyes can see and what my ears can hear (I don’t), the incentives in place lead to nowhere

I’m just not for getting government to hop on that bandwagon, because whatever else happens, I’m convinced that any regulation of speech and content of speech is an open invitation for government to begin regulating ideas under the guise of regulating content of speech: the two are too closely linked for it to be otherwise. Europe is dominated by boards that govern appropriate speech, and which assign value to said speech. Many anti-Islamist politicians have been tried under those laws. Just a few decades ago, those boards were regulating decency. The wrongness of an act is not sufficient basis for criminalizing said act: there’s just too much of a slippery slope (especially when it comes to speech), and too little agreement between me and government on what constitutes morality/decency for me to make a deal with the devil on the issue.

I live in Tucson, so I have the opportunity to defend Christians’ right to self-expression in the real world much more than I do here. Just so happens that on a conservative board, you get more people calling for degenerates to shut up than the opposite. My ideal, as you well know, is not to have Christians shut up: it is to have *no one* shut up.

As to jobs? I support an employer’s right to fire any one of his employees for any reason (so long as it doesn’t break a contract signed by the two), including racism and other not-so-great things, but yeah, being fired for being a Christian is a lousy reason to get fired and I would neither fire someone for being one nor stand by idly if it happened at my workplace.

I firmly believe that sex is a very good thing, and that it was designed by God. Should a rapist cite my statement to blame me for his actions? I guess he could, but I would hope that he would be laughed out of the courtroom for such an assertion. Likewise, Clinton’s actions were wrong, but between two consenting adults. It is inappropriate to assume that he would hold this as equal to the actions of two prepubescent minors, or that the minors, teacher, or parents thought that Clinton’s ridiculous semantic argument regarding oral sex were valid, and thus reasons to allow abuse and the incident to occur.

Ugh, I feel like I should take a shower after defending Clinton’s sexual practices.

OTOH, their parents and teachers are. There is, again, no indication that “society” was the defining factor in this case: the vast majority of children and adults believe such incidents to be beyond the pale. I don’t think that we have a culture amenable to predators: “stranger danger” is as much a factor as it ever was, and both liberals and conservatives (with some odd exceptions) believe that preying on children to satiate a sick sexual appetite is both sick and should be criminalized. I believe that these kids were abused (possibly by the teacher who got suspended? the parents?), and that the abuser should be brought to justice. But we shouldn’t transfer the blame from the pervert (or whoever caused this) to society at large, no matter how banal society has gotten.