RUTHFULLY YOURS

Videogames that allow a “player” to sit in front of a monitor for hours—and hours—obliterating realistic images of people are a protected form of “free speech.” Thus sayeth the Supreme Court last week, 7-2. On First Amendment grounds, the decision overturned a California law forbidding the sale to minors of violent videogames, generally called shooter games, that give players the option of “killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.”

Writing for the majority in the aptly named Brown v. Entertainment Merchants, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that classical literature abounds with stark imagery: “Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven.” (This truly was a horrid image the first time one’s mother read it, notwithstanding that the cooked victim is a child-eating witch.)

Back when Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was still in the even bloodier videogame called Race for the Presidency, he suggested the Republican Party declare a “truce” on social issues to concentrate instead on economic revival. In reply, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote in these pages that the American people don’t want a truce. Both social conservatives and tea partiers, he said, “expect pro-life, pro-family legislation.” California’s videogame law presumably would qualify.

It looks like Mr. Daniels wins that argument. There’s not much chance of finding a Terry Schiavo in this campaign. The main social issue of the 2012 election is, and should be, finding some 15 million jobs. New York’s passage of a gay-marriage law, one of the great battlegrounds in the culture wars, passed through the talk-show fields of fire in a few days.

Presumably videogame violence would fall under the no-discuss truce. That’s too bad. This is what the culture war is really all about. It’s ironic that the only place today one can find serious people discussing something like the effect of extreme video violence on the culture is the Supreme Court, the court whose decisions—abortion, school discipline, Christmas crèches in the public square—touched off the culture war.

The Supreme Court decided the videogames case correctly. Hyperviolent videogames aren’t the First Amendment’s fault. The First Amendment is a bystander to a reality that made even la-la California try to pass a law—the inexorable coarsening of American culture. That coarsening’s history was written some years ago by Rochelle Gurstein in “The Repeal of Reticence.” In response to the argument that much of this stuff is basically harmless and victimless, she argued that its cumulative effect on the culture over time is not so harmless—”the common world becomes literally shameless.” Out of it falls Anthony Weiner.

If there was any right-left consensus in the comments about the Entertainment Merchants decision, it was that parents should step up and take responsibility for protecting and policing their children. What an interesting thought. That’s exactly what the famous, often vilified “religious right” said and did 25 years ago.

That movement wasn’t primarily about abortion or gay rights. It was a reaction to a broader coarsening of the public culture, which can literally hit home on any given day. When the public schools rolled over, pushed by Supreme Court decisions weakening administrators’ ability to maintain discipline and decorum, the evangelicals and Baptists fled to a more moderate culture in their own private schools. Some inner-city parents sought refuge in Catholic schools. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas used his dissent in the games case to trace the history of parental authority.

You don’t have to be a Baptist parent to feel embattled by the culture today. Social media, nonstop marketing and digital technology are like massed armies against the average mom and pop. Whatever the argument for laws, lawsuits and codes to separate the sludge from the drinking water, these remedies always bog down in endless wheel-spinning. We need to look elsewhere.

Let’s stipulate that American culture from the beginning has often been fast and furious. We get that. What’s at issue here is whether there are limits at all to how far down they will push it. In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito cited a recent news story about a planned videogame called “School Shooter: North American Tour 2012,” which lets players re-enact the Columbine or Virginia Tech massacres. Gamers themselves have criticized “School Shooter,” but they also seem to believe that so long as the victims are fictional, no amount of slaughter is off-limits. It’s just a game, unless it’s about real people.

A place to start stepping back from the edge of the cliff would be reviving and legitimizing the idea of community standards—as opposed to no community standards, which is the self-eroding standard we have now. In his dissent to Entertainment Merchants, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer cited the use of “community standards” for drawing lines around what’s acceptable.

That standard may be too vague to pass First Amendment muster. But it’s a starting point for the community to push back. Why should parents have to take on these culture-destroying forces alone? Opinion-makers of every political compulsion—in the media, in politics, in academia—ought to help parents shame the producers of shameless products. Draw a line in the public sand between cultural creations that the community can deal with, and the stuff no one should have to deal with.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

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