Not true.
Stanley v. Georgia unanimously recognized a right to lawfully possess obscene material in the privacy of one’s home, but later cases found that such a right did not exist for receipt.
Thankfully, what counts as ‘obscene’ is not objective and is decided on a case-by-case, state-by-state basis, even at the Federal level, according to a combination of the consideration of individual state law and community standards.
It’s certainly not perfect, nor is it in any way ideal, but things will be changing in that regard within the coming years. There is no value in retaining the obscenity doctrine, and inquiry into the bipartisan legal scholar consensus will reveal how indefensible the obscenity doctrine truly is, both from a perspective of its practical application in terms of obscenity law enforcement, as well as the very concepts by which the obscenity doctrine is founded, to the precedent that shaped it, as well as the core question as to whether the First Amendment could be reasonably interpreted to delineate protected ‘indecent’ expression and exclude ‘obscene’ pornography from its scope of protection, as well as the way the landscape has changed over the years.
There is simply no value in the obscenity doctrine.
From a philosophical standpoint, it seems to contradict the First Amendment at every possible angle while, from a practical standpoint, it actively undermines, if not wholly invalidates the core function and purpose of the First Amendment by taking an ideological, preferential position on certain types of speech and depriving those who do not share those ideals or preferences their right to express themselves or partake in the marketplace of ideas, all the while imposing draconian penalties on those who commit the heinous and unforgivable crime of having a different opinion, all the while fallaciously passing off matters of opinion and conjecture as though they are that of fact.
If a particular state legislature or Congress were to enact a law that essentially targeted the sale and distribution of child pornography, but defined child pornography as any type of material that catered to pedophilic interests, such a law, despite having valid intentions, would be unconstitutional because such interests are matters of taste or preference, and the First Amendment, as a general rule, prevents the use of such things as a justification for speech regulation or censorship, and such a regulation would not fail strict scrutiny. It’s happened before, and it’s called “viewpoint discrimination” and “content-based proscriptions”, which the First Amendment prevents against.
The obscenity doctrine has all the signs of bad precedent. It’s vague, unjustified, originates from a flawed, dated understanding of facts, and even had its own initial proponents (Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Potter Stewart) turn against it after seeing what type of problem it would come to be, especially in the dawning of the information age.
