Reply #5: transgression is the kick--users need more and more of it, which is the essence of Gonzo

[zazen]

But I think the deliberate cruelty to animals is horrible enough on its own and presumably illegal in most states. The SCOTUS decision is bizarre to me, and I hope the new legislation recently introduced in Congress is passed.

Maybe I develop a fetish, to, I don't know, watch cars get set on fire. So an industry forms where half-drugged, naked 19-year-old females are "hired" to set fire to people's cars while pretending to orgasm. Destroying others' cars is illegal, but according to SCOTUS, filming and distributing it isn't.

Why is my right to this supposed fetish more important than someone else's right to property and peace? Why, if a large swath of society tracks down such YouTube videos and identifies who set these cars alight in an attempt to arrest them, are instead the car-arsonists protected in the name of their "right to speech?" Why would my right to get my jollies off of destroying someone else's property be more important than their right to have their car left alone? Why isn't the primary issue here that crimes are being committed, rather than that the criminals and the voyeurs have some inherent right to "express" themselves through enacting a crime and then selling a video of it so that another population can condition their orgasm to it?

And to those who would object that a car is property, why is the right to that property more sacred than the right of a mammal, bird, or advanced reptile to its life or at least a life free from sustained, deliberate cruelty?

Catharine MacKinnon put it best, and I'm paraphrasing. Just like in the Dred Scott case in the 19th c . . . Saying Blacks weren't property, ever, was not the same as depriving whites of property rights. And saying that abused, coerced adults, any children, and any animals, aren't someone else's free "symbol" to manipulate, violate, and even kill as they will, is not the same as depriving those people of their free speech. They aren't "speaking" when they're doing that. They're committing a crime.

All crimes could be said to communicate an ideology--battering, murder, even Madoff's fraud. That doesn't make them any less a prosecutable crime.

Hope this helps.