“The Supreme Court ruled Monday that it is unconstitutional to bar children from buying or renting violent video games, saying government doesn’t have the authority to ‘restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed’ despite complaints that the popular and fast-changing technology allows the young to simulate acts of brutality,” Jesse J. Holland reports for The Associated Press.

“On a 7-2 vote, the high court upheld a federal appeals court decision to throw out California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors,” Holland reports. “The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Sacramento had ruled that the law violated minors’ rights under the First Amendment, and the high court agreed. ‘No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm,’ said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion. ‘But that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.’”

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Holland reports, “An unlikely duo, conservative-leaning Clarence Thomas and liberal-leaning Stephen Breyer, agreed that the California video game ban should have been upheld, but for different reasons.”

“Breyer said the court’s decision creates an insurmountable conflict in the First Amendment, especially considering that justices have upheld bans on the sale of pornography to children,” Holland reports. “‘What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?’ Breyer said. ‘What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman — bound, gagged, tortured and killed — is also topless?’”

“And Thomas said the majority read something into the First Amendment that isn’t there,” Holland reports. “‘The practices and beliefs of the founding generation establish that ‘the freedom of speech,’ as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians,’ Thomas wrote.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]