Linguistically The First Amendment is a) Religious Amendment and b) Would Not Privilege Erotic Images

July 18th, 2010

A Heuristic Inquiry

By Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D.

Précis: A linguistic study of the First Amendment's finds its key task the protection of religious freedom, speech and assembly. Since Roth v. United States (1957), the Supreme Court has ruled that almost any image or expression is covered by the First Amendment. However, science now corroborates biblical admonitions - that is, if the free speech mission is to facilitate logical, cognitive thought, images, especially erotic images, are actually subversive of that mission. Many, perhaps most, Americans wish to stop filmmakers, television programs, schools, teachers, and organizations like SIECUS and Planned Parenthood from imposing pornographic stimuli, sights, and sensations upon their school children. On the evidence, such erotic media non-consensually alter immature brains, minds, bodies and in too many cases, their overt behaviors. Logically, the harms from such media/pedagogical sex frauds are statistically significantly greater than harms to children from tobacco. A linguistic analysis of the First Amendment finds the words "image," and "expression" excluded from its protections. It is presumptuous and elitist in the extreme to think our highly educated, cultured, religious, and worldly Founders were ignorant of the idolatry inherent in images, especially erotic images, versus their commitment to protect the thought enabling power of "The Word."

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Several recent reversals of established legal precedent adhere to Justice Antonin Scalia's originalist legal philosophy. Of images he wrote, "[u]nder current doctrine, pornography may be banned only if it is ‘obscene,'. . . . a judicially crafted term of art. . . ." As in FCC v. Fox Television, it is time for the Court to return to the Founders' semantically established intent. An analysis of the Bill of Rights finds images unprotected by the language of the First Amendment, with erotic images especially abhorrent to its intent. It is time to return also to President Lincoln's 1865 postal act that stated "no obscene book, pamphlet, picture, print, other publication of a vulgar and indecent character, shall be admitted into the mails of the United States." "Obscene" included "vulgar and indecent." The bawdy French "picture postcards" Lincoln referenced were significantly less obscene than sex education materials pedagogues now retail to public, private and parochial schoolchildren. Fewer and fewer people read any longer, but get their ideas, and indeed the conduct they mimic, from images. Major legal reversals await a cadre of lawyers who, like our Founders, possess mental and moral metal and who now have the research to prove that our laws must reflect, as John Adams said, "a moral and religious people."