EXCERPT
A decade ago, Congress decided it was time to address what a House report called “a very specific sexual fetish.” There are people, it turns out, who take pleasure from watching videos of small animals being crushed.
“Much of the material featured women inflicting the torture with their bare feet or while wearing high-heeled shoes,” the report said. “In some video depictions, the woman’s voice can be heard talking to the animals in a kind of dominatrix patter. The cries and squeals of the animals, obviously in great pain, can also be heard in the videos.”
So, in 1999, Congress made it a crime to sell “crush videos” and almost all other depictions of unlawful cruelty to animals.The conduct itself is disgusting, of course. But the law does not criminalize the cruelty, which was already illegal in all 50 states, only its depiction. By making such expressions illegal — adding a new category of speech to the very few that are entirely unprotected under the First Amendment — the law raised profound constitutional questions about whether and when the government can decide that some sorts of information have no social value at all.
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