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Published: February 27, 2009
“Collecting blood money from kids”
Parents Television Council wants California to appeal federal court ruling invalidating state law that restricted sales of sexually explicit and violent video games to minors
News release from Parents Television Council
Feb. 23, 2009
LOS ANGELES -- In response to a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that struck down a California law designed to prevent the sale of adult video games to minors, the Parents Television Council has called on its members to voice their support for California state Sen. Leland Yee’s call for the decision to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sen. Yee, D-San Francisco, was the author of the legislation, which passed the California State legislature in 2005. This law was later shot down due to the video game industry’s lawyers. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appealed, and the Ninth Circuit Court issued its ruling, saying that the law violates the rights of minors under the Constitution’s First and 14th amendments.
 “Let’s be clear on what – exactly – is going on here: The video game industry has established a policy to ‘protect’ children from a harmful product, yet they file lawsuit after lawsuit to oppose any enforcement of that same policy,” said Parents Television Council president Tim Winter. “And they base their legal argument on a child’s ‘right’ to purchase the very product that they openly admit should not be purchased by a child. This is the most outrageous example of a non sequitur that I’ve ever seen, and the result is a tragic consequence on America’s children.
“How does the video game industry even have legal standing to sue on behalf of children who wouldn’t be able to pay them for the very products they admit that kids shouldn’t be buying? I’ll tell you how: greed. The only motivation for the industry to sue is to keep collecting blood money from kids who aren’t supposed to be able to buy these games without their parents present at the time of purchase.
“There are very responsible retailers out there – Wal-Mart and Game Stop come to mind – who take their obligation not to sell these games to kids very seriously. Yet industry representatives claim this law is unfairly biased against them. They must be forgetting that the goal of this law was solely to enforce the video game industry’s own retail guidelines not to sell M-rated or AO-rated video games to children.”
The Parents Television Council’s 2008 “Secret Shopper” campaign revealed that video game retailers sold Mature (M)-rated video games to minors 36% of the time.
“If the industry actually followed its own rules, then this law would have absolutely no financial impact whatsoever on the industry,” said Winter. “But of course the industry doesn’t follow its own rules, and they don’t want a consequence for violating them.”
Winter continued, “Shockingly, the Court’s ruling claims that there isn’t enough research to support that children are affected by video game violence. Yet countless independent studies confirm what most parents instinctively know to be true: repeated exposure to graphic sexual, violent and profanity-laced video games has a harmful and long-term effect on children. Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine – and countless other objective studies – have proven violent video games do have an effect by using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to observe which areas of the brain are stimulated when a subject plays violent video games.
“This federal court decision is a disgrace and should be of great concern to all parents – not just in California but across our nation. We applaud state Sen. Yee’s efforts to see that this decision goes to the U.S. Supreme Court and we are encouraging our members to do voice their concern as well,” Winter concluded.
Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 3:15 AM By Charles O'Connell
"We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 9
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Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 5:33 AM By JPeterman
This hardly means much. Parents need to take charge of everything their kids watch because the evil is everywhere in this culture of death. If there are no outright violent or explicit images in television, video games, and movies, there are hidden messages in films such as Aladdin and Lion King. Unfortunately, unless it's from a trusted Catholic company, you risk exposing your kids to this brainwashing garbage.
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Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 6:04 AM By Ted
Surprise!!! The 9th Circuit can normally be counted on to issue rulings like this. It must be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. There are video games out there that should never be allowed in the hands of kids. Even a little sense would be an improvement, both in that blighted industry and on the Bench!
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Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 12:14 PM By betty
I can't believe the argument that this law violates the rights of kids to watch whatever they want to watch. it is just so awful that anybody could actually put forth this argument. Tomorrow my kid is going to walk up to you and kick you in the shins. So whaty if you just had knee surgery? My kid has a right to kick you in the shins if he wants to.
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Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 2:44 PM By Victoria
I don't know much about these video games since, to me, they seem such a waste of time. However, I know children and young adults are fascinated by them. But from what I do know is that the games would be a good way to steer child like and adolescent minds to just about any direction, and not just Violence.... Smoking, Drinking, Pornography, Drugs. Who knows what subliminal messages are being planted into those children's little brains as they unknowingly play those games.
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Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 6:55 PM By JLS
Victoria, most that I've seen are of two categories: 1. Destroy or be destroyed; 2. Racing. There are characterizations in the destroy or be destroyed category, which tend to follow the genre of hero and villain. The moral backdrops are pretty much the same as found on TV. A bigger problem is likely porn, available on the internet. Ever look at those little advertisements on Youtube? You can go to decent Youtube sites and find mostly related video sites, but then sometimes the links show a teaser, which is designed to lure the viewer. Years back, schools had a hard time filtering this junk out. It is not often today that a school computer can pull up any porn. But the kids have lots of internet access both at home and on their own hand held devices that they take to school with them. The solution is to educate your children as thoroughly as possible at home and at the parish. This means, as far as I'm concerned, rigorous training and inculturation of Catholicism in Her absolute most potent dimensions. My protestant parents believed kind of in the protestant version of predestination ... ie, that one's character is the result of a "throw of the dice", and that the way to raise them was simply the Viking custom to "throw them into the fjord, and if they swim then you keep them, but if they don't then Odin will take them back. Catholics often today are moving more towards such old pagan ways, and losing their sense of God's love for all souls.
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Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 10:36 PM By Anne T.
These same people who say films and television do not affect children will turn around and put in "hate" speech laws. Their hypocrisy is astounding!
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Posted Saturday, February 28, 2009 5:19 AM By Fr. M.P.
More good reasons to keep kids away from most of what's on TV.
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Posted Saturday, February 28, 2009 11:37 AM By Mark from PA
It is interesting to talk to you JLS because you have a different view of things. I went to 12 years of Catholic school so I have a different background from you and was taught different things growing up. I went to a public college but was active in the Newman Club and went to daily Mass often during my college years. I feel that I constantly grow in my faith in learning from the homilies at Mass. So because of our different upbringings we have different emphases in our faith.
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Posted Saturday, February 28, 2009 2:14 PM By JLS
PA, everyone has a different background. That is why we all need to make sure that we learn the truth. Yes, there are different views of the truth, but when such views contradict one another then one or both are false. I have indeed been learning some good stuff from you ... namely patience. Also, the challenge you present is worthwhile. I personally require far more than only the homilies. In fact the homilies and sermons I've heard serve to move me to further study and reflection on the Word of God. If you want some really good homilies addressed to the Church now, then read what Pope Benedict puts forth. But my view is to read the three or four books published by the late John Paul II, the theme of which is in my view the most important one that the Church is faced with in Her efforts to teach and disciple us all ... the personalities of God (three of them) and the unique personality of each member of the Church. In other words, the late Pope has tackled the problem of who we are, the second greatest thing for us: The first is to worship God (Who He Is), and the second is to love our neighbor as ourself (who we are). His great works deal with the heart of the Eleventh and Greatest Commandment.
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Posted Sunday, March 01, 2009 6:02 PM By Thuvia Parth
In reply to JLS: God is three Persons in one Being. *** Within the absolute Simplicity of God, there is a distinction between the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. This distinction is both absolutely real -- and absolutely relational. (Else God's absolute simplicity and unicity would be contradicted.) *** But JLS, there is no such thing as "the personalities of God" -- as if God were like the psychiatric Eve with her "the three faces", i.e., with her three
"personalities." To the contrary, we can no more speak of the three "personalities of God" than we can speak of the three "deities" of God. To speak of the three deities of God is to fall into the error of tritheism. To speak of the three modes of God is to fall into the error of modalism. To speak of three "personalities of God" is also to fall into the error of modalism. These errors -- tritheism and modalism -- stand contradicted by the Church's authentic tech on the Blessed Trinity, according to which (1) God is three Persons in one Being, and (2) only the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity -- the Second Person become man -- had, in his human-expressive "personality" PERSONALITY in the modern Renaissnce sense. This human-expressive "personality" is expressive of the Second Person's human nature even is the Second Person is one divine Person, with two natures, divine and human.
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Posted Sunday, March 01, 2009 11:00 PM By JLS
Thuvia, you continue to write from some perch that does not exist. Every single person has a unique personality; otherwise, they'd be somebody else. God has three personalities because He is three persons, each person with his own personality. The personality of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit ... I count three personalities. But you count only one? You are the one talking about modes, and not I. I am talking about the personality of the Father, and the different personality of the Son, and yet the also unique personality of the Holy Spirit. But you say that each person of the Trinity shares only one personality ... that there is only one personality of God and this one personality is shared by each distinct person of the God the Holy Trinity? Can you give the proportions of that one personality that each Person has? Or is the one personality shared in common with no aspect of it more close to any particular member of the Holy Trinity? And your sense of "expressive personality"??? What nonsense is this? You define personality like Hollywood does ... I prefer the way the late Pope John Paul II deals with it. Why? Because it makes sense, whereas your Hollywoodesque / psychology-esque concept is absurd.
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Posted Monday, March 02, 2009 8:15 PM By Thuvia Parth
In reply to JLS: I wrote: "God is three Persons in one Being" (which is orthodox) and you read me as "saying that each person of the Trinity shares only one personality" (which is a completely muddled formulation that can be found nowhere in my post). Moreover, I took care to point out that the human "personality" of Christ is a function of the human nature of Christ, yet I also cautioned: Christ is one divine Person, with two natures, divine and human. (Deny THAT and we deny the teaching of the Council of Calcedon.) Trinitarian theology, JLS, is not a "high perch" in some abstract or remote sense; rather, Trinitarian theology affirms that God is uncreated Being, in which Being there are three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This great truth is something we affirm every time we express the Sign of the Cross in words.
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Posted Tuesday, March 03, 2009 5:33 PM By JLS
Thuvia, maybe it's my goading, but your theology is beginning to sound more Catholic lately.
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