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The First Amendment's language leaves no room for inference that abridgments of speech and press can be made just because they are slight. That Amendment provides, in simple words, that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." I read "no law . . . abridging" to mean no law abridging.
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Concurring opinion, Smith v. California, 361 U.S. 147 (1959).

 

Hugo Black

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Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

 

Martin Luther King

 

There Is Absolutely NOTHING Perplexing About This Story
Real defenders of the First Amendment, such as Leland Yee and myself, understand that what constitutionalists call "political speech" is fully protected by the Constitution. What is not protected is the marketing of adult-rated porn and violence to kids. To the extent that the latter is tolerated, the real First Amendment is cheapened.
What is hypocritical here is not the stance of Yee and me, but rather the knuckleheads who exult in their "pixelante" status--which is defined as someone who tries to shut up video game critics--and then, in the name of freedom of expression, threaten me, my wife, and my right to speak out on the issues of the day.
The only censors, the only opponents of the First Amendment, are gamers who will not tolerate any dissent on their masturbatory game of choice.
Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson

 

Unfortunately, the "games aren't speech" comments attributed to me at the Delaware House Judiciary Committee hearing were not fully reported. I went on to note that the controller's use as a data input device as well as the means by which the Dual Shock controller gives biofeedback renders the entire mechanism a device, which of course it is.
It is this argument that carried the day at our November 3 hearing in Alabama on the First Amendment, which I alone argued, against the mighty and unethical Blank Rome, and we won the hearing on my argument. So, kids, you can fuss and fume all you want, and the guy who showed up in a T-shirt at the hearing can be as upset as he wants, but nobody but an extremist ideologue thinks that mature-rated games whose "M" label is an admission of the harm to minors of the games thinks that a video game is "political speech" under any sane reading of the First Amendment.
If you all don't know what "political speech" is, then you need to review some court cases on the subject. As to whether games are speech of any kind, please note that "speech" doesn't cause hand injuries which are warned of on the Dual Shock Controller.
A video game isn't any more "speech" than a gun is. Both are devices.
And for all of you who think that the First Amendment protects everything, tell Dennis McCauley to stop acting like a child and preventing me from posting here through Live Journal. You all have missed a ton of bad news for the video game industry simply because Dennis McCauley can't, as a journalist wannabe, handle the truth.
Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson

 

What has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a necessary evil," and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

 

Voltairine de Cleyre