Censorship: The “Right” to Remain Silent

What do you think of when you see a string of random characters inserted into a piece of writing? Do you think that maybe it was a typing error, or maybe that the writer was drunk, or maybe that he was just really *#(&$#@ stupid. Or, like just now, you thought that the author was maybe referencing a vulgar word. Why do we think this? Who tells us that these words are bad and must be shielded from our eyes? In actuality, many people. And these people have made stands to make all offensive material illegal. In other words, they want government censorship. Is that really logical? Is that the solution to all of our problems? I think not. Censorship would be a pitfall to our country for many reasons, ranging from unethical to unlawful.
Censorship is a direct violation of the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution. This amendment specifically states that the government cannot under any circumstances infringe on a U.S. citizens right to free speech. Many believe that showing offensive material such as violence and pornography is not technically “speech.” Author Salman Rushdie said “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist,” and I completely agree. Censorship basically destroys all of the rights of U.S citizens completely. As Americans,we have the right to say anything we want without having fear of it being expunged, regardless of how offensive it could be to others. Our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution with the rights of the People in their minds. If the government were to successfully censor our speech, our rights would slowly start to disintegrate, and soon the government would take full control.
The main reason that people think that government censorship is a good idea is because they believe that the government needs to protect minors from viewing offensive material. Now I ask you this: if the whole point of censorship is to protect our children from pornography, curse words, and violence, then why in the world is it the government’s responsibility to do that for you? Or maybe you don’t care about the minors, but the material offends you. Well, I have some advice for you: just avoid it. According to Judge Curtis Bok, “If [you] are appalled by what you read, then [you] can close the book at the bottom of page one.” Our government is busy trying to run the country! It is not its job to protect children from something that could potentially be harmless. I am not implying that violence and pornography have benefits; I simply don’t think that it’s the government’s job to censor it. Parents should be the one who decide their child’s providence.
I want you to imagine this little scenario: it is now your turn to decide whether censorship shall be enforced by the government or not. For the purpose of this scenario, we are going to assume you completely ignored everything in this paper, and determine that government censorship is a good idea. So in the next few years, the government starts to censor. It starts off great; the government is censoring the cuss words in movies, the pornography on the Internet is starting to disappear, violent video games are now harder to come by. But soon, problems emerge. One person of the government censorship committee determines that reading Shakespeare's poetry is offensive, and soon all the ancient literature in our country is banned. Later, another man realizes that back in the day, women’s ankles were offensive to some people, so those are banned too. People on the committee figure out that in the South, black people are offensive, so they ban all African Americans. Eventually, everything we knew of America is completely wiped out, and you realize what an imbecile you were. This scenario that I just presented shows how censorship could get very complicated. It also shows you just how difficult it would be to decide what material is unfit for publicity.
Overall, I believe that censorship is an absolutely terrible road for our country to travel down. Not only is it be unconstitutional, but it would also be a complete waste of the government’s precious time and money. Not to mention the chaos that would result from it. When we consider what needs to be done to our country, we need to think of our freedom as Americans and our rights above all. Do we really want to throw away the very thing that we have fought countless wars to obtain? Americans are lucky to have the freedom that we have. Do we really want to be the ones to lock our own cage?