To a carnivorous vegetarian.

The Supreme Court today strongly rebuked Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin’s attempts to purify broadcast airwaves of anything he considers to be “indecent.” For the past several years, the FCC has come under intense pressure to restrict vulgarity (which it calls obscenity) on broadcast television. Understandably, this “crackdown” of sorts has united broadcasters, who have found the rules (and the increased fines) overbearing, and a significant number of free speech advocates who have found the resulting censorship contemptible.

I can understand parents being concerned about their children being exposed to inappropriate language or concepts on broadcast television. I can also see the point of those who say that there probably isn’t anything wholesome for children, anyway, in the live programming, like awards shows, that are most subject to the controversial “fleeting expletives.” I can also (perhaps especially) appreciate concerns that an unelected commission (of four men and one woman) has so adamantly inserted itself as an arbiter and decider of what is or isn’t fit for Americans, or their children, to see or hear.

All of this is neither here nor there, though. What really shocked me, when reading the news of the Supreme Court decision today, was FCC chairman Kevin Martin’s breathtakingly atrocious response. The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire posted their thoughts on Martin’s statement, and I couldn’t agree more. The very words, which Martin seemingly considers (considered?) obscene, are printed repeatedly, over and over and over again, in his “statement.” By comparison, another FCC commissioner, Michael Copps, issued a concise statement that failed to contain even a single inappropriate word, and his statement conveyed what I think the FCC is trying to do in a much more professional, respectable manner.

On Wikipedia, there’s a rule, called POINT. The shortest description: “State your point; don’t prove it experimentally.” Kevin Martin’s apparent experiment to try to rile up contempt for vulgarity by being vulgar himself is an embarrassment to the FCC. If we have to deal with this sort of unhelpful, destructive rhetoric for the remainder of Martin’s term, until 2011, then I’m afraid for people on any side of the obscenity issue. As long as Martin thinks the issue itself can be used just to prove a point, he’s really just proving, quite tastelessly, that he just doesn’t have a grasp of the issue himself, at all.