Principles in Practice: The Blog of the Objective Standard

Friday, August 24, 2007

Stop Playing Games with the Rights of Parents

Posted by ARI Media at 1:54 PM

Irvine, CA—A federal judge recently struck down as unconstitutional a California bill that would have criminalized selling or renting "excessively violent" video games to minors. A spokesman for Calif. state Sen. Leland Yee, who helped draft the legislation, defended the bill saying: "We prohibit children from smoking. We regulate driver's licenses. We prohibit alcohol. We prohibit lots of things from children, and we think it's logical that kids should not be able to purchase these games on their own." Similar bills have been passed or are being considered in many other states.

But according to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute: "Protecting children from violent video games is the job of parents, not politicians.

"A violent video game is not a physical threat to a child. Like a book or a movie, its effects are intellectual—it depicts words and actions that communicate certain ideas and values. As with adults, the government's only proper function is to protect children from physical force. Just as it has no business deciding what ideas and values adults should be exposed to, so it has no business deciding what ideas and values children should be exposed to. That is a judgment that only parents have a right to make. Parents have the right—and the responsibility—to judge the messages about violence conveyed by a particular video game and to decide what messages about violence their children may be exposed to. While the government has a right to restrict a minor's ability to purchase physically dangerous items, such as alcohol or explosives, it has no right to stop him from buying a video game.

"The ultimate result of video game bans would be to establish a dangerous precedent: that the government should have the power to decide what ideas children may be exposed to. If it can ban selling video games to children on the basis of the ideas those games convey, then why not books, movies, television shows, and works of art? If it can condemn certain ideas about violence as 'unacceptable' for children, then why not ideas about religion, or politics, or morality? And if it can punish retail clerks for transmitting these 'unacceptable' ideas to children, then why not parents as well?

"Parents properly want to shield their children from the gratuitous violence so common in today's video games. But we must not allow power-hungry politicians to use that desire as a pretense for usurping the rights of parents to oversee the intellectual upbringing of their children."

Labels: Business and Economics, Individual Rights and Law