You may remember a few years back there was some press coverage about kids allegedly attending drag shows in Florida. That led to the Florida legislature passing the Protection of Children Act, which made it a misdemeanor to admit a child into an “adult live performance.” The statute actually defined that term to track the Supreme Court’s three-pronged “Miller Test” (the test uses language that probably sounds vaguely familiar to you—phrases like “appeals to the prurient interest” and “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” etc.). Still, the court—in a majority opinion by Judge Rosenbaum joined by Judge Abudu—held the statute was unconstitutionally vague, focusing on the statute’s reference to “lewd conduct,” which the court said was an ambiguous phrase that would necessarily sweep in some protected speech.
This might be headed for an en banc hearing. Judge Tjoflat wrote a lengthy dissent and at least one other court, the Sixth Circuit, ruled differently when examining a similar statute. See Friends of George's, Inc. v. Mulroy, 108 F.4th 431, 439 (6th Cir. 2024).
Opinion by John Byrne on Scribd
4 comments:
Would be nice if headlines didn’t rely on the propaganda titles of bills and actually were descriptive of the law struck down
This entire body of "obscenity" case law, much like the jurisprudence on religion and government, is a clown show of judicial contortions. Judges, as human beings with their own personal philosophies, seem fundamentally incapable of accepting the Founders' core principles: “Congress [and the states, via the 14th Amendment] shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . or abridging the freedom of speech . . . .” They just can’t wrap their heads around it.
The "community standards" prong of the Miller test is a prime example. It amounts to a majoritarian rule; precisely what the First Amendment was designed to guard against. The point of protecting speech isn’t to ratify majority taste, but to shield minority expression from suppression by the majority.
However much I might (or might not) find it abhorrent to take kids to drag shows, if those are the moral standards some parents want to teach, the government has no place interfering.
Freedom isn't free. And that doesn’t mean bombing brown people in sandy countries to secure it. It means tolerating (and defending) the rights of others to do things we find difficult to stomach, because that’s the only way to guarantee our own. That, my friends, is what a free country, or a "free state of Florida," looks like.
Look at this clown-tastrophe: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-394_9p6b.pdf. The Nine can’t even agree on what should be the simplest issue of all—whether creating and funding a public Catholic charter school violates the First Amendment. Of course it does!
In what world does creating and funding a state-regulated Catholic school not establish religion? Jesus H. Christ. The government would literally be paying for—and participating in—the teaching (i.e., the establishment) of religion to children.
My read of the silent opinion is that they’re so deeply and fundamentally divided on the issues that they agreed to have no written opinions and not even to indicate who voted how, because otherwise it would just get venomous.They're probably also shielding whoever the common sense moderate might be from the conservative block (probably the Chief).
Yet again, Judge T's silent generation mind just can't wrap itself around LGBTQ+ issues and therefore pens a rambling and nearly incoherent dissent that will place him squarely on the wrong side of history, once that's written.
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