Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 12, 1990 TAG: 9006120380
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
His imagination is sufficiently libidinous for him to find that mere words - in this case, the words in a popular if tasteless rap album by the group 2 Live Crew - depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way.
His aesthetic standards are sufficiently honed that he can determine not only when serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value is present, but also when it is absent.
His knowledge of his community, the multicultural Miami metropolitan area, is so broad and so deep that he knows what the average person there would find prurient.
It took all that, under Supreme Court precedent, for Gonzalez to declare 2 Live Crew's raps outside the pale of the First Amendment. The result is an act of arrogance that makes a laughingstock of a federal court and demonstrates the risk of setting forth formulas by which speech can be suppressed.
According to an Associated Press report, the album "contain[s] references to violence against women and abusive sex, though they're tempered with humor." It's the kind of speech, that is, which is distasteful enough not to be republished in most newspapers.
But the case involves only adults. It involves no use of public funds to support controversial "art." It involves no infliction of anything on anyone who doesn't want to hear it.
Yet for selling the album, a Fort Lauderdale record-store owner was charged Friday with a misdemeanor, punishable by a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Members of the group were similarly charged Sunday, after performing in a concert at a Hollywood, Fla., club.
Americans being Americans, the best-selling album now is apt to enjoy even greater, if undeserved, popularity. But such marketing, courtesy Uncle Sam, does not come free.
Two days of the court's time were wasted last month while Judge Gonzalez pondered the value, or lack thereof, of "As Nasty As They Wanna Be." This past Friday, the investigation and arrest of Freeman required the services of an undercover Broward County cop and six deputies. The charges Sunday against the 2 Live Crew members came after a squadron of word police were sent to monitor the show.
But the cost of misdeploying court and police resources is light compared with the cost of eroding freedom ofspeech. If the government is to be in the business of marketing trash, at least let it not be done by trashing the First Amendment.
by CNB