What is the Communications Decency Act (CDA)?
The CDA criminalizes “indecent” speech on the Internet. One section of the CDA defines indecency as speech depicting or describing sexual or excretory acts or organs in a patently offensive fashion under conetmporary community standards. Each of these clauses–indecent, depicting or describing, patently offensive, and contemporary community standards–hides a landmine threatening the future of freedom of speech in this country. • “Indecent” “Indecency” is a vague standard long used to prosecute explicit, outspoken speech in the Western world (for example, Radcliffe Hall’s pathbreaking but actually very restrained lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was indecent because of the phrase, “And that night, they were not divided.”) Indecency laws are completely unconstitutional as applied to print media, while broadcast spectrum scarcity has been used as a rationale to continue applying such laws to broadcast media. Indecency laws in general, the CDA in particular, contain absolutely no ex
