Paul Waldman on constitutional originalism and the possession of crush videos:
When the Founders wrote the words “freedom of speech” into the Bill of Rights, they certainly didn’t considered the possibility that one day, Americans would buy and sell “crush videos,” which depict women stepping on small animals with their high heels. Yet the Supreme Court was recently called upon to determine whether that rather unusual form of expression stood outside the First Amendment. While the Court spends much of its time ruling on highly technical matters of commercial and administrative law, every so often it considers a case like this one, which goes to the very heart of the American experiment precisely because of its unsettling nature.
Conservatives are talking a lot about “getting back” to the Constitution these days. Some even go so far as to don Colonial-era garb on the occasion of political protests, the better to express their fealty to 18th-century values. But the truth is that as brilliant as the text of the Constitution is, it can’t tell us exactly how to order our 21st-century society.
