To the Supreme Court: What is wrong with you people?

While I disagree with your decision on the California bill proposing restricting minors' access to violent video games, I'm willing to concede that free speech is a slippery slope kind of thing, and I'd rather have too much of it than too little. I'm very much okay with that.

What I'm not okay with is your lack of any form of logical construction in your decision.

From the decision:
The Act covers games “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being, if those acts are
depicted” in a manner that “[a] reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors,” that is “patently offensive to
prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors,” and that “causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
for minors.”

Seriously? Murder, dismemberment, and sexual assault might not be considered a deviant or morbid interest? Okay, sure, these can have literary or artistic merit. I'll give you that one, even if the phrasing here drips with irony and the bill does stipulate that literary and artistic merit are okay-- at least we can still have Titus Andronicus for PS 2 and XBox.

But here's the part where I start to have some trouble:
Our cases have been clear that the obscenity exception to the First Amendment does not cover whatever a legislature finds shocking, but only depictions of “sexual conduct,”” Miller,
supra, at 24. See also Cohen v. California, 403 U. S. 15, 20 (1971); Roth, supra, at 487, and n. 20.

I'm going to leave alone the double standard that violence is somehow not obscene but sexual conduct is. Jon Stewart did that argument better than I ever could, anyway.

But how is an image of a woman being pulled in half, from the crotch up, by a man tugging on each foot not a depiction of sexual violence? How is that less obscene than ANYTHING Larry Flynt ever came up with? I think we are all on board that Hustler is free speech, but there's a reason they keep it behind the counter and ask for ID at the local Quik-E-Mart. Or is sexual violence somehow less offensive than "sexual conduct"?

Even less logically, you say that the California bill does not include restrictions on other kinds of entertainment, such as Saturday morning cartoons. Um, did the MPAA and Federal Communications Commission decide to close and not tell anybody?

And that's the central flaw of your argument is that this this country "has no tradition of specially restricting children's access to depictions of violence." Tell that to the twelve-year-old trying to buy a ticket to a Quentin Tarantino movie.