Minors and First Amendment Rights
Etzioni, Amitai
THE WAYS societies view children have changed a great deal over the generations. Authoritarian societies tend to see minors as adults in all ways other than in their small stature. These...
...Anybody can provide room and board, and love comes naturally...
...As I see it, the ideas that children are vulnerable, requiring some initial protection, and that if they have "corrupting" thoughts adults should help them sublimate them in socially constructive directions rather than encourage them, are the mark of a civilized society...
...These items help parents and educators to guide children...
...Access to violent material (especially detailed designs for destruction and programs that explicitly glorify mayhem) would be more limited than to sexually explicit material, about which both conservatives and civil libertarians tend to obsess...
...These societies presume that children assume responsibility for their acts...
...Helping children to develop the moral and intellectual faculties needed to make responsible choices when they grow up is what raising kids is all about...
...Whenever Heins senses that she is about to lose her readers, she quickly—but temporarily —admits that little children, maybe those four or younger, may not posses the same First Amendment rights as adults, that they are developing creatures rather than adults able to make discriminating judgments on their own...
...Some ultraconservatives —and several feminists—would like to ban certain sexually explicit materials altogether...
...Her notion is that exposure to vile and violent material can actually provide a catharsis to twisted instincts rather than implant them, provide them with detailed designs to make their actions more harmful, or urge those who succumb to such instincts to act...
...Parents not only have a right but a duty to help shape the education of their children, to help them choose which books they should read, which music they should listen to, DISSENT / Fall 1999 79 which television programs they should watch, and which to avoid...
...Period...
...To keep her thesis even temporarily alive she performs the lawyerly trick of referring to social science studies that support her case, ignoring all others...
...However, the battle against such moves can and has been fought without sacrificing children...
...An approach that truly builds on the civilized notion that children are developing creatures would gradually liberalize their exposure as they mature, protecting especially well those in primary school or younger...
...Indeed, it is something parents and educators do routinely, and very unmythologically.Why is Heins so keen to leave children unprotected from all the vile and violent stuff the media and the Internet dish out...
...Because she believes arguments that minors need some protections are actually "a shorthand for suppressing ideas and subjects that are considered immoral and offensive...
...adults are expected to help children develop into mature young people able to form their own judgments...
...AMITAI ETZIONI is the author most recently of The Limits of Privacy, and teaches at George Washington University...
...I also had better find out if one of my children is deep into Mein Kampf, The Anarchist's Cookbook, or The Unabomber Manifesto, so I can help him learn to deal properly with these poisonous works...
...Marjorie Heins, in her article "Rejuvenating Free Expression" (Dissent, Summer 1999), draws on the traditional view of children to advance the harmful proposition that children have First Amendment rights like adults...
...But by the next paragraph we are back to "younger children" and minors...
...Heins includes in her "censorship juggernaut" items such as "v-chips, Internet rating and filtering schemes, [and] 'explicit lyrics' labels on popular music...
...Children are tried as adults, jailed with them, and hanged next to them...
...it would continue to shield those in junior high school (approximately ages eleven to thirteen) rather extensively, and gradually reduce such protection thereafter...
...At what age to draw what lines...
...Here she may have a point...
...The American Library Association rules and laws in several states bar librarians from disclosing to parents which books their children read at any age...
...However, anyone who does not set out like a lawyer to make a case by any means and ignore all counter-evidence would acknowledge that there are numerous studies showing that children are indeed harmed...
...For a moment she comes up with a very reasonable standard: that as of age fifteen or older the presumption should be against excluding the material to which young people are exposed...
...Above all, Heins's notion that children have First Amendment rights against their parents must be laughed out of court...
...Just in case one did not get the point, Heins elaborates mockingly, "Children in American political mythology have become tender innocents, incapable of conceiving a corrupting thought unless it is thrust upon them...
...The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with which Heins is associated, went to court to demand that public libraries remove filters introduced to protect children twelve years and younger...
...In contrast, civilized societies treat minors as a distinct legal and moral category, as developing creatures who gradually become adults but are not...
...The key word is "citizens," which negates any difference between children and adults...
...Whenever she finds that her proposition is unsustainable, she temporarily takes cover behind the civilized view that children constitute a distinct category, only to strike again...
...A page later Heins makes her point even more explicitly: "youngsters, like adults, possess free-expression rights...
...The age at which protection of minors should be reduced is the crux of the matter, the place where the current public policy and legal issues are being fought out...
...and—most surprisingly—she invents children's First Amendment rights against their parents...
...If a classmate of my son has committed suicide, and my son seems depressed and is spending long hours alone in the library, it is my duty at a minimum to find out if he's merely reading Dostoevsky or if he's perusing the Hemlock Society's how-to books...
...But developing a child's character is a parent's highest duty—a duty no civil libertarian should interfere with...
...HEINS REFERS to the works of psychologists to support her various points, especially her claim that under most circumstances violent media imagery does not harm children...
...Heins opens by arguing that several court cases limiting the kinds of material teachers in public schools can expose children to—leav78 DISSENT / Fall 1999 ing private schools, parents, and media to fill the void—treat children "as fragile creatures in need of protection from controversial or 'immoral' ideas rather than [as] citizens possessed of First Amendment rights...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
