Ah Tennessee. Rolling green hills, pastoral scenes and gently grazing moronic lawmakers eating the long stalks of imbecility growing everywhere. And thus are dumb, unconstitutional laws born.
The new legislation adds images to the list of communications that can trigger criminal liability. But for image postings, the “emotionally distressed” individual need not be the intended recipient. Anyone who sees the image is a potential victim. If a court decides you “should have known” that an image you posted would be upsetting to someone who sees it, you could face months in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.
If you think that sounds unconstitutional, you’re not alone. In a blog post, constitutional scholar Eugene Volokhpoints out just how broad the legislation is. The law doesn’t require that the picture be of the “victim,” nor would the government need to prove that you intended the image to be distressing. Volokh points out that a wide variety of images, “pictures of Mohammed, or blasphemous jokes about Jesus Christ, or harsh cartoon insults of some political group,” could “cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities,” triggering liability. He calls the bill “pretty clearly unconstitutional.”
I am sick unto death of the micromanagers of America. If you want to make a society weak, then try to ban everything you disagree with or might possibly disagree with at some unknown point in the future. Don’t we have enough schisms in our society already without resorting to this sort of modern day foolishness? Bill Haslam you have earned my ire for allowing this buffoonery. In the future, I’ll be sure to post as many possibly offensive images as possible. I dare Tennessee’s dumbest legislators to take me to court. People won’t stand for this sort of reprehensible crap. We have real problems to worry about. Let’s get this dumb law off the books quickly. You have zero right to a life free of offensive behavior by others.