Here are today’s dispatches from the crossroads of faith, media and culture.<\/p>\n
1. Supreme Court rules against California’s ban on selling violent video games to minors. <\/strong>From The LA Times<\/a>: These are not easy decisions. They shouldn’t be. Nor, despite the 7-2 vote, does it appear to have been easy for the Supreme Court.<\/em>
\nWriting for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”<\/em>
\nIn his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the court’s more liberal members, argued in favor of California’s restrictions, signed in 2005 but never enforced.<\/em>
\n“What sense,” Breyer asked, “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?”<\/em><\/p>\n