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I find the speech in this case patently offensive, hateful, and insulting. The Court should not, however, gloss over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it does not like.
--
Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2002) (dissenting).

 

Sonia Sotomayor

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Today's decision is the pinnacle of our Eighth Amendment death-is-different jurisprudence. Not only does it, like all of that jurisprudence, find no support in the text or history of the Eighth Amendment; it does not even have support in current social attitudes regarding the conditions that render an otherwise just death penalty inappropriate. Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members.

 

Antonin Scalia

 

The meaning of the First Amendment has been, and will be, shaped by each American generation: by judges, political leaders, citizens. There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.… But I am convinced that the fundamental American commitment to free speech, disturbing speech, is no longer in doubt.

 

Anthony Lewis

 

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

 

I define speech as any communicative activity. [Can it be nonverbal?] Yes. [Can it be nonverbal and also not written?] Yes. [Can it encompass physical actions?] Yes. Watt [Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Watt, 703 F.2d 586 (1983)] was a case in which what was at issue was sleeping as communicative activity. What I said was that for purposes of the heightened protections that are accorded, sleeping could not be speech. That is to say, I did not say that one could prohibit sleeping merely for the purpose of eliminating the communicative aspect of sleeping, if there is any . . . [and] I did not say that the Government could seek to prohibit that communication without running afoul of the heightened standards of the first amendment. If they passed a law that allows all other sleeping but only prohibits sleeping where it is intended to communicate, then it would be invalidated. But what I did say was, where you have a general law that just applies to an activity which in itself is normally not communicative, such as sleeping, spitting, whatever you like; clenching your fist, for example; such a law would not be subject to the heightened standards of the first amendment. That is to say, if there is ordinary justification for it, it is fine. It does not have to meet the high need, the no other available alternative requirements of the first amendment. Whereas, when you are dealing with communicative activity, naturally communicative activity—writing, speech, and so forth— any law, even if it is general, across the board, has to meet those higher standards.

 

Antonin Scalia

 

One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment, Potter.

 

William O. Douglas