Fuck This Shit

Last week the Supreme Court of the United States ordered a federal appeals court to re-examine its ruling in favor of CBS Corp. in a legal fight over entertainer Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction”. The high court directed the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to consider reinstating the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission imposed on CBS over Jackson’s booby bailout at the 2004 Super Bowl. The appellate court said the incident lasted nine-sixteenths of one second and should have been regarded as “fleeting.” The FCC previously deviated from its nearly 30-year practice of fining indecent broadcast programming only when it was so “pervasive as to amount to ‘shock treatment’ for the audience,” the appeals court said.

This ruling came as no surprise as it was on the heels of the Supreme’s 5 – 4 decision that narrowly upheld the FCC’s policy threatening fines against even one-time uses of curse words on live television. The offending events were live broadcasts of awards shows in which Bono, Cher, and Nicole Richie purposely, or perhaps let slip, what amounted to a random fuck here or a single shit there. Justice Antonin Scalia would only refer to the pronouncements as “the f-word and the s-word”.

Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps called the decision “a big win for America’s families.” Copps said the “decision should reassure parents that their children can still be protected from indecent material on the nation’s airwaves. ” Scalia, joined by his four conservative colleagues, said the FCC “could reasonably conclude that the pervasiveness of foul language, and the coarsening of public entertainment in other media” justified a stricter policy “so as to give conscientious parents a relatively safe haven for their children.” Representing the dissenting opinion and the voice of sanity, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, raised obvious constitutional concerns. Ginsburg said that in a case that turns on government restriction of spoken words, “there is no way to hide the long shadow the First Amendment casts over what the commission has done.”

Taking into consideration the context in which each of the litigated instances occurred, it is absurd to believe the four letter expletives have anything to do with sex or excrement. These words are a historic part of our American vernacular, and a tool of verbal emphasis that I am sure is not lost on Justice Scalia, a Sicilian-American from New Jersey.

When used either as a modifier as in Bono’s comment that an award was “really fucking brilliant”or as a metaphor, as when Cher said, “Fuck ‘em,” to her critics, or a combination when Nicole Richie complained on air that “getting shit out of a Prada purse was not so fucking simple” the future of our children is not compromised. Compliant  parents already left that up to Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Antonin Scalia’s conservative wing of the court and their war on the Constitution.

As of now, the FCC can only regulate what goes out over our broadcast networks. For now, cable television, the written word, and the internet do not answer to what amounts to net nannies in black robes. As far as I am concerned, decency is in the personal eye of the beholder, and since Justice Scalia referred to Cher and Ms. Richie as “foul-mouthed glitteratae from Hollywood” with no derogatory pronouncement for the Irish male rocker, I will follow the justice’s example, his apparent definition of intent, and my First Amendment rights when I refer to the elder jurist as a fucking sexist pig.