Oklahoma 'Games As Porn' Bill Now Law

simoniker writes "Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry has signed into law the State-specific Bill HB30004. The bill redefines a list of items, such as hardcore pornography, deemed harmful to minors to include videogames which use 'inappropriate violence'. The new Oklahoma law is due to come into effect from November 1st. The story notes: 'Despite being one of the more draconian anti-games bills put before a State senate, HB30004 has faced limited opposition, with apparently little concern being given to the consistent problems other similar bills have faced from legal challenges.'"

Comments

This is not surprising

[thedogcow]

This is Oklahoma we are talking about. As someone that lived there, I can attest to the true backwardness of the state. The state is run by clueless demagogues who fall to the pressure of the Baptist church. Take a look at these frightening statistics

Ultimately this will lead to Oklahoman flocking to Texas to buy video games as well as their porn (since that is illegal too).

I lived in Oklahoma for 5 years. Now I live in urban Houston, Texas. Oklahoma makes Texas look like a liberal oasis. At least people here have more of a "let live" policy than "God hates you".

Semantics

[quantum bit]

Interesting that by wording the bill that way, that means that they're recognizing a class of "appropriate violence". I wonder how that's defined...

As much as I enjoy living in Tulsa...

[revlayle]

Oklahoma has one of the worst legislation faculty in the county. Also, their salary/compensation for senate/house memebers are realtively higher comapred to other states in similar economic situations (not that the economy is HORRIBLE here, but the cost of living is low, but they get paid higher than perhaps some states that a bit higher cost of living).

couple that with this being THE Bible Belt (we have a many churches as we do convenient stores, and we have a LOT of convienient stores), poor education, and crappy voter turnouts... the government does almost as they damn well please.

What they are doing with video games now, they tried with comic book stores and game (RPG) shops 10-15 years ago. Once they started creating too much of a ruckus with citizens (the OK goverment, that is), that crap eventually got beaten down into obscurity. Now we hear VERY little about it any more (probably now people with the jobs and some sort of income and intelligence either were more likely to 1) still play RPGs and read comics OR 2) at least USED to, but not anymore, but understand those who do OR 3) didn't play or read, but never saw the big deal around any controversy attributed to such mediums AND they have some srot of voting influence these days)

Luckily things DO get thrown out as unconsitutional... but until then, OK will be dicks about it.

Re:Meh.

[thebdj]

Um, yeah it does. No state constitution can abridge a freedom guaranteed under the US Constitution. The 10th Amendment states that: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

That more or less reads, if we do not specifically say something here, then it is up to the states or the people to make up their own laws/rights in regard to the issue. Now, what constitutional clause does it violate? Freedom of speech. This is the argument that has been used to help relieve other states of these horribly vague bills. You see, most state Supreme Courts have ruled them unconstitutional because they use language that is non-determinate and that requires an individuals (or small group of individuals) to make a judgement call on what is deemed "inappropriate violence."

The problem with these vague terminology is that you run into cases that parallel problems you see in movies as well. There are parents who in a million years refuse to let their kids see R-rated movies, but how many of those same parents do you think may have dragged their kids to see "The Passion of the Christ"? Is that movie "inappropriately violent"? In the minds of Christians, it might not be. While a viewer who does not share their beliefs might find some of the depictions grotesque and violent.

Would we run into this same problem if someone created a "violent" video game that was based on the bible? I mean there are parts of that book that are pretty grotesque. I can only hope that this sort of thing gets knocked down by a court with enough common sense to see it for what it is...

Wrong Amendment and Miller v. California.

[Valdrax]

Before the Civil War, there was strong arguments for the idea that the limitations on the federal government (as noted in the 1st Amendment "Congress shall make no law") did not apply to the state governments. The state governments could theoretically pass laws abridging the freedoms of its citizens that the federal government could not. The 10th Amendment is in fact the strongest source of support for that idea. A restriction barring the federal government from doing something is not "power delegated to" it -- it's the opposite.

After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was passed specifically to prevent Southern states from passing laws that discriminated against blacks in the way that the federal government could not. This is known as the Equal Protection Clause (and has sadly been used to defend the rights of corporations far more than it has been used to defend the rights of minorities). It reads like this:

"Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This is the clause that extends limitations on the powers of the federal government to the state governments and prevents the abridgement of free speech by them.

However, pornography and obscenity have long been ruled by the Supreme Court as having lesser protection that political speech. The case Miller v. California set forth a test to determine pornography that has been used ever since. Justice Burger in his opinion wrote the following:

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Change "sexual conduct" in part (b) to "violence to people" and you've probably got a bill that would survive a Supreme Court decision. Whether or not the list of barred things is overly broad and violates the second test is where it's most likely to stand or fall. The third test is where a lot people think that works will escape, but as Burger says in the sentence immediately following this test, "We do not adopt as a constitutional standard the 'utterly without redeeming social value" test of Memoirs v. Massachusetts.'" You can read more about obscenity and the 1st Amendment here.