Brooklyn parents, who were hot and bothered by a billboard featuring a naked blonde across the street from an elementary school, have won their fight to have the sign taken down.
I'm glad the parents won, but it's further evidence that the judges and justices who created the modern First Amendment environment where this is even an issue were driven by short-sighted ideology.
The courts that fashioned this jurisprudence were not relying on the Constitution and American norms, but rather the work of J.S. Mill (who wrote from England in the mid-nineteenth century). I read a few chapters from Mill's On Liberty a few months ago, and I was interested to find that even he indicated that the open society may not work, if the society's denizens are not sufficiently civilized. Based on the chapters I read, he didn't seem to foresee the possibility that the extreme version of the open society that he advanced could cause a civilization to recede, thus resulting in a condition where the open society doesn't work any more. He was a smart man. I'd be curious to know what he thinks about the extreme situations (e.g., public lewdness must be tolerated in the name of free speech) that his ideas-in-a-vacuum have created.
Picture of the billboard:
