There are two sides to every slope.

The Supreme Court recently struck down California’s law prohibiting the sale of extremely violent video games to minors, saying the law improperly violated the free speech rights of merchants and children. A common sentiment about this ruling is, “Well, that’s what free speech means. Besides, if you start limiting this form of expression, who knows what will be the next thing to be censored?”

This pattern of reasoning is called a “slippery slope” argument, and it compares the political restriction of vulgarity to a hill on which government (and our freedoms) rest precariously. If we allow even one inch of movement in the wrong direction, our freedoms will slip away into tyranny, or so the argument goes.

The first sign of danger in this argument pattern is that it specifically avoids discussing the merits of the particular issue in question. It seems no one actually defends the sale of such games to minors (aside from those who seek to make a buck from it). Instead, the argument only looks down the road for eventual danger rather than considering current danger. Thus, people worry that limiting commercial expression in this way will jeopardize all the rest of our precious free speech. Of course, it’s fair to be concerned about both this step and the others which might come later. But it’s also fair to be concerned about the danger of things sliding too far in the other direction as well. The slope, you might say, slips both ways.

In protecting these games, the Court is affirming a culture which ruins children in a thousand different ways. And if these games had been proposed to the America of, say, 1930, the idea that this is an important freedom would have been scoffed out of the arena. In other words, that side of the slope has come true, whereas the “tyranny of censorship” which people fear from allowing the California law isn’t even a remote danger.

Economists say there is no such thing as a free lunch because somebody has to pay. The same holds in politics. That’s why we must be on guard lest while defending against slipping down one gorge of ruined values we haven’t already fallen into another one. At this particular point in American history, which do you think is a more pressing cultural hazard: the potential for future loss of free speech or the actual absence of parental authority and corruption of children’s moral development?