Censorship

The topic which I plan to follow throughout the year is censorship and what constitutes someone or something to be censored. Censorship is hotly contested because constitutional rights versus moral rights come into play. The publication of a Nazi newspaper is one's freedom of speech and the press, but it is quite immoral to produce such a product and not many people are going to have a hard time telling the publisher to stop making his/her newspaper. The controversy of censorship is important because it forces Americans to look past certain moral rights and realize (or not realize for some) the constitutional rights that must be upheld. In doing this, perhaps an American will look into what the Constitution actually says and learn something about American history! American schools have seen censorship first hand as some are not allowed to distribute certain books to their students. Many parents argue that books like The Catcher in the Rye or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are dangerous for the children of America because they display themes or diction that is inappropriate. Books have been used to fight censorship, a bit of a paradox. Fahrenheit 451 is a book about what terrible things will happen to society if books are banned. Banning books is a serious form of censorship and the author makes a clear point that through censorship comes a government far from democracy. Heinrich Hein states that "wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings," meaning that the human spirit is found within books and no book should be censored. Censorship, in this case, becomes a bigger deal because for those writing the censored works it is as if they have thrown away their soul. Sigmund Freud states that "in the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."

Jimmy Kimmel presents a case where a congressmen proposed to throw anyone that curses in the media, in jail. Kimmel, being a comedian in the media, has a little fun with the idea of what would happen if everything was unnecessarily censored. Here is the link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0jjXTEqQP4 - Although poking fun, Kimmel is showing that if you censor something that you believe is immoral or inappropriate, then who is to deem something immoral or inappropriate? Should a committee be set up by the government to waste more tax dollars so that American children can not hear a curse word on television? Meanwhile this child's parents are letting him/her watch Spongebob, which has just recently been proven to make your children dumber: http://www.dailygossip.org/study-says-spongebob-makes-kids-stupid-1491

Censorship is something which, I believe, should never, and can never be in a democratic government. It becomes too opinion based and the founding fathers would be appalled to hear of the stifling of the American people's rights. They did not bicker and fight over the Constitution for nothing. They thought long and hard for the future of this nation and as a result, the greatest country the world has ever seen has come to being. Censorship, however, could be its fatal flaw.