Legal Niches

Video Games Are Equivalent to Fighting Words, Conservative Group Argues in Supreme Court Brief

By gamepolitics

The conservative Eagle Forum has filed an amicus (friend of the Court) brief with the United States Supreme Court in support of California's 2005 violent video game law.

As GamePolitics reported last month, California Attorney General Jerry Brown petitioned the High Court to review a U.S. District Court ruling that the state's 2005 law blocking the sale of violent games to minors is unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court upheld the District Court decision in a February ruling.

The family values group, founded by conservative Phyllis Schlafly (left) in 1967, filed the brief on Monday. The document was authored by Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis and founder of Conservapedia (sort of the anti-Wikipedia). In the amicus brief, the Eagle Forum lays an array of societal problems at the feet of violent video games: bad grades, violent behavior, poor graduation rates, school shootings, game addiction and even sudden death.

We'll let the Eagle Forum's laundry list speak for itself (with a little help from GP's trusty red pen):

The First Amendment does not render our nation's youth defenseless against the predatory, billion-dollar video game industry that churns out increasingly graphic blood and gore for impressionable minds to imbibe...

 

The corruption of our nation's youth with increasingly deviant video games is a matter of national importance. Our nation's youth is in crisis, by any measure. A calamitous 30% of our nation's youth fail to graduate from public high school, and only 32% of those who attend public high school are ever qualified to attend a four-year college...

 

A substantial percentage of teenagers are hooked on these disturbing video games, and spend many hours each week playing them. Moreover, mass killings perpetrated by youngsters are frequently linked to addiction to violent video games...

 

The First Amendment does not forbid state legislatures from keeping this harmful material from children. The California legislature, not known to be conservative, protected its youth against the predatory video game industry. It was an error with national implications for the Ninth Circuit to invalidate the California statute...

Violent video games hurt children in two ways. Their increasingly realistic and disturbing images burn into children's impressionable minds much as pornography does, and the role-playing inherent in a video game causes the child to buy into the rampages of murder and other heinous crimes that he is acting out...

 

The early market leader in video games was Nintendo, which adopted a policy against 'excessive blood and violence,' but it was trounced in sales by a 3 to 1 margin by more gory material produced by Sega, and Nintendo learned the message that 'violence sells video games to children...'

 

Numerous studies confirm the obvious: violent video games do cause addiction and harm... There has never been a full First Amendment right to flash highly objectionable and disturbing images specifically at children, or to entice them to participate in destructive role-playing behavior...

Displaying a shocking image to a child is conceptually identical to the utterance of 'fighting words' to an adult, which this Court famously held to be out-side of First Amendment protection...

The stress attributed to violent video games can even be physically harmful. Eighteen-year-old Peter Burkowski, an avid video gamer, collapsed and died of a heart attack while playing games in an arcade...

 

Children who play violent video games have difficulty obeying authorities, treating peers properly, and succeeding in school...

DOCUMENT DUMP: Grab a copy of the Eagle Forum's amicus brief here.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on June 26, 2009 (boomark / email).