Supreme Court overturns Anti-Animal Cruelty Law in First Amendment Case

[Punum]

What are your thoughts about the Supreme Court ruling? There are two sides to this story. I wanted to share some comments on both sides and their links. I know your feedback and thoughts would very much be appreciated. There is a never ending battle about what is “right” , our constitutional rights and what they really mean, views on animals and how they should be treated, etc.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday forcefully struck down a federal law aimed at banning depictions of dog fighting and other violence against animals, saying it violated constitutional guarantees of free speech and created a “criminal prohibition of alarming breadth.”

The 8 to 1 ruling, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., was a ringing endorsement of the First Amendment’s protection of even distasteful expression. Roberts called “startling and dangerous” the government’s argument that the value of certain categories of speech should be weighed against their societal costs when protecting free speech.

The law was enacted in 1999 to forbid sales of so-called crush videos. They appeal to a certain sexual fetish by depicting the torture of animals — cats, dogs, monkeys, mice and hamsters, according to Congress — or showing them being crushed to death by women wearing stiletto heels or with their bare feet. While dog-fighting and other forms of animal cruelty are already illegal, Congress said the legislation was necessary to stop the production of videos for commercial gain.

Wayne Pacelle with the Humane Society of the United States states,“The U.S. Supreme Court dealt animals a serious blow in its ruling today, upholding an appellate court decision that invalidated the federal law banning the commercial sale of videos showing illegal and extreme acts of animal cruelty. The Court got hung up in a stream of hypothetical scenarios, imagining that the law as worded might sweep up the sellers of hunting, bullfighting, and other videos that the federallawmakers never intended to address.

With Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the eight justices in the majority, the Court ruled that the statute was substantially overbroad, saying that the criminal prohibitions in the statutes were of “alarming breadth.” The justices did concluded by saying we “do not decide whether a statute limited to crush videos or other depictions of extreme animal cruelty would be constitutional.

We only hold that §48 is not so limited but is instead substantially overbroad, and therefore invalid under the First Amendment.” The Supreme Court also reinforced the important and compelling government
interest in protecting animals from cruelty and abuse, noting that “the prohibition of animal cruelty itself has a long history in American law, starting with the early settlement of the Colonies.”

We look forward to your comments and suggestions on this issue.