Censorship: suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive". Offensive: giving painful or unpleasant situations.

These two words can easily be looked up and defined when having to use them in a paper, but trying to describe what should be censored and what is offensive is a daunting task. There have always been huge debates over censorship that aims at the First amendment and whether it is constitutional for a group of people to decide what is right for the people.

Even before World War I, there were attacks on what was considered offensive material. "Anthony Comstock, head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, passed the first censorship law in 1873. The law forbade the mailing of anything, in his opinion, lewd, obscene or indecent." (Zelezny, 453) The controversy over censorship raged feverishly after WWI and until the Tariff Act of 1930, many literary classics were not allowed into the United States because of the obscenity contained in them. Over a 15-year period, which began in 1957, the Supreme Court made relaxed restrictions on "obscene" material.

Supreme Court decisions struck down many obscenity statues, states responded by enacting laws prohibiting

There are other cases that have pushed the CDA envelope. Joe Shea, the editor of American Reporter, challenged the law, in the District Court in New York, by using the freedom of the press angle in April 1996; the case was never tried due to the CDA being found unconstitutional.

The Communications Decency Act attempted to regulate boundaries by censoring the Internet and defining what "offensive" was. This act will never not face scrutiny because it does the one thing that Americans pride themselves on the First Amendment and the stipulation that "Congress shall make no law...abridging freedom of speech, or of the press."

On June 12, 1996, a three-judge court in Philadelphia ruled in favor of ACLU stating that the CDA was an unconstitutional abridgment of rights protected by the First and Fifth Amendments. A few months passed and on June 26 by a 7-2 vote, the United States Supreme Court affirmed that the CDA violated the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom of speech. The government filed for an appeal to the Supreme Court on September 29, 1996 and the ACLU filed a rebuttal to the appeal on October 31st. Finally, on March 19th, 1997, both sides of the case were presented in front of nine justices and it was determined that the Internet was granted the highest level of First Amendment protection. This case was distinguished from the Pacifica case where the issue was a FCC order, which applied to radio, that was protected under the First Amendment.

The invention of the Internet presents another set of issues. It is a method of public communication and a source of information that is aimed and controlled by the government. Many different types of creative works are found on the Internet, some of which people would find in their own eyes "offensive". Now, in order to decrease the amount of obscene material on the Internet, the government began passing laws to censor this medium. Obscenity can be banned on the Internet, just as any other medium, and in the 1996 case of the United States v. Thomas, a husband and wife began operating a bulletin board system from their home. "The system included e-mail's, chat lines, public messages, and photo files that subscribers could download to their own computers" (Zelenzy, 505). The viewers that didn't subscribe would receive a screen that read "Welcome to AABBS, the Nastiest Place on Earth." This eventually convicted the Thomas' of violating the fede

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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)