There is, of course, some regulation of certain phases of the moving
picture industry that is defensible. But it seems to me very unjust
to compare the demand for censorship power to the same kind of
governmental regulations of industrial affairs which have to do with
business competition between individuals or corporations, or with the
distribution of foodstuffs as to deleterious substances, on which no
two minds can well differ after science has given its verdict.
Reasonable regulations as to business competition, labor, shipment of
films, protection from fire, ventilation, seating, spacing and lighting
of halls may well apply to the movies. But as a more justly analogous
case, who would say even as to foodstuffs or drugs, about which we hear
so much, that a board of bodily appetite censors should have a right to
say whether a city’s diet should not include pork chops, if a person
preferred them to mutton chops, simply because of the views or tastes
of the censors, or because great religious teachers have censored the
hog and approved the lamb; or that tea and coffee should be censored
because other teachers say the taste of too much of it is worse than a
moderate use of booze. The so-called badness of most pictures may be
due far more to that which is bad in the taste of the censors than that
which is really bad in the pictures.