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News article

You can now be slapped with a fine of several hundred dollars for swearing in public in Arlington, Virginia. The law isn't new; Arlington's adoption of it actually puts it in line with a general statewide ban on public swearing, which has existed for quite some time in Virginia. This particular event has brought the law some extra scrutiny, though (reddit discussion thread, for example).

ITT: discuss if this ban has any reason to exist. Do you support it? Does it violate the First Amendment? Is it practical?

I don't think it violates the first amendment. It's kind of common sense that free speech has its limits like threatening to assassinate the president, yelling "shark" at the beach when there isn't one, or yelling "fire" at a movie theater. Cursing kind of falls under that in that it's protecting people (mostly children and old ladies) from being exposed to unnecessary vulgar language.

How the fuck is this legal? How? Do people really think cussing actually harms anything? Please. please, someone take this to court

Oh god, swearing is not that fucking bad. This is so fucking stupid.

…… I din't think it's breaking the First Amendment, because isn't that about being jailed, not being fined? But it is unpractical…

The problem is that yelling shark actually does harm, saying shit harms absolutely nothing.
Also, it's not about jailing or fining, the first amendment protects against abridging of free speech, no matter how minor, except when it can cause harm, like fighting words and slander

As a Virginia native I'm familiar with the basic public swearing law, but I don't think Arlington should punish people with a fine of a couple hundred dollars. While I would argue that it does kind of go against freedom of speech, but then again there's a time and place where public swearing should be allowed and can understand that some people, like parents with young impressionable children, may not take too kindly towards vulgar language. And the most punishment I would give someone would maybe be something like community service for about an hour.

Go in your activity, Ctrl + F a vulgar word. See any swears? Unless you're prepared to fork over a wad of cash than there is no reason for you to support this bill/think it is constitutional. And if you didn't find any, I'm willing to bet a lot of money you've said something vulgar in the past.

As for the Constitutional definition, hate speech is protected as free speech, I don't see why swearing shouldn't be as well.

I want to live in a world where I don't swears because I'm not foul mouthed, not because it's illegal.

edit:
@Desu

I'm sorry to say this, but, saying a bad word isn't the same as threatening to kill the President or yelling bomb in a movie theater. Around the early 1990's when the internet was around, people made the same argument "think of the children" to stop porn and vulgar things from being posted on the internet (Which failed miserably and was ultimately removed/rewritten).

What the fuck, is this the fucking 50s again? Where's Lenny Bruce when you need him? Or even better…

If the courts let this shit stand, I'll be very concerned about the state of the First Amendment.

There's a big difference between the internet and real life. Porn on the internet is fine because its in a controlled setting, and you don't have to encounter porn if you stay off of the wrong sites. But that doesn't make it right for me to go and look at a porno mag in a public place.

it’s protecting people (mostly children and old ladies) from being exposed to unnecessary vulgar language.
That.. doesn't make sense. That is plain censorship. No one is harmed from bad language.

This is completely against the first amendment.
What even is considered vulgar language? Yea, there are some obvious words, but there are other words that are sometimes considered bad, and other times not.
No, really, how is this legal?

@Desu

Okay, I kinda knew that but that wasn't my point. Your argument "think of the children" has no merit in law or is a reason to censor something and in the past (Like the Internet Decency Act I mentioned) has failed.

But could you tell me why threatening to kill the President and saying the F-Word are the same levels of danger? Or why hate speech is considered free speech and swearing for some reason isn't?

Porn isn't protected by the first amendment

Your argument “think of the children” has no merit in law or is a reason to censor something and in the past (Like the Internet Decency Act I mentioned) has failed.

again internet =/= real life

But could you tell me why threatening to kill the President and saying the F-Word are the same levels of danger? Or why hate speech is considered free speech and swearing for some reason isn’t?

I never said that they were the same level, I said they fall under the same reasonable limitations of free speech.

@Desu

"reasonable limitations of free speech"

I'm sorry but, what? How is this a reasonable limitation when it doesn't hurt anybody? If a child overhears someone swear are they doomed to become a horrible person or outburst in tears?

I never said that they were the same level, I said they fall under the same reasonable limitations of free speech.

How?

You see, the nature of the punishment is irrelevant. Just go ahead and take a look at the First Amendment itself.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And then later on we added the Fourteenth Amendment.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Ever since 1925 with Gitlow v. New York, the Supreme Court has sustained the precedent that the specific portion that I highlighted above works to apply the protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to the states as well as the federal government, in what is termed the incorporation doctrine.

Now, for the legislation itself, the "obscenity" argument will invariably come up- indeed, it's only one of two general rationals for barring speech currently allowed by the Court, with the other relating to that which is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". (I pretty much disagree with the obscenity rational in the first place, but that's a discussion for another day.) But what exactly is obscenity in a legal sense? Thankfully, the Court has our backs here as well with the Miller Test, the current standard that must be used to make such a determination.
It goes like so:
1. Would "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" find that the work (i.e. piece of speech/expression), taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest?
2. Does the work depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law?
3. Does the work, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value?
Only if all three of these questions can be definitively answered in the affirmative will speech be declared obscene and thus outside the bounds of First Amendment protection.
It is self-evident that such "anti-public swearing" legislation does not take any of this into account- it can't, because it works indiscriminately rather than on a case-by-case basis. Thus, it is completely and totally unconstitutional.

I'm more supportive of the idea. In a way, i think it forces people to be more selective with their words, and i don't think it can be considered censorship. If it was censorship. people won't be allowed to make opinions and stuff. This is just so that people would mind their words.

Ideas cannot be separated from the words that are used to express them. Thus, the act of limiting the vocabulary one is able to use cannot be separated from that of limiting the ideas one can express. This is the principle of Newspeak.
In addition, the concept of so-called "curses" being somehow inferior forms of expression is nothing more than linguistic opinion. As a counter-example, I once again urgently point to the work of George Carlin.

Ideas cannot be separated from the words that are used to express them. Thus, the act of limiting the vocabulary one is able to use cannot be separated from that of limiting the ideas one can express.

Experts say that linguistic determinism doesn't work like that.

Sorry, Orwell.

http://junq.info/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/06/Whorf-effects.pdf

Why are people so opposed to cursing anyway? It's a way to express strong emotions and vent frustration. What? Are we not allowed to be strongly displeased by something?

I can understand if people don't want to use curse words themselves, but why restrict others vocabulary because you don't like the word? And what constitutes a cuss anyway? Fuck and Shit is obvious, but what about Dick or Pussy? Or Crap and Damn? What about Hell? The line is too blurry to make a law about it. There is just so much wrong with it.

That link isn't really relevant to what I said. First off, I'm not referring to internal perception, as linguistic relativism does, but rather outward expression- though generally within the same sphere of interest, they are very much different topics. Also, you seem to be asserting that some kind of consensus has been reached against that theory, which, even if this study you've cited firmly concluded against it, would be unfounded. But take another look at the abstract:

"The goal of this study was to test a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis dealing with one of the biggest unsolved questions in linguistics: Does language affect the way we think? Grammatical systems in the world’s languages differ in many aspects. Unlike English or German many languages group nouns on the basis of noun classifiers. Recently research has addressed the question if these linguistic categories built up by classifier systems influence non-linguistic thought. In this paper we studied Mandarin Chinese and Thai--two languages with classifier systems. Although both are classifier languages they categorize objects in different ways. We tested if these system differences lead to different similarity judgements of objects in a non-linguistic rating task (participants had to rate the similarity of picture pairs). In contrast to previous studies we surprisingly observed no difference in categorization. It seems that the so-called Whorf effect, i. e. that language affects the way we perceive and categorize the world, diminishes rapidly over the time as speakers are exposed to a different language system such as, in this case, German."

Public swearing is an example of speech your homeowner's association is allowed to regulate, but your government is not.

Also, you seem to be asserting that some kind of consensus has been reached against that theory, which, even if this study you’ve cited firmly concluded against it, would be unfounded.

If so, I would ask you to retract your previous post where you took the strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis as being objectively correct.

And here's some more reading

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.html

I never did such a thing. Again, I was referring to language in terms of how it is used by individuals to express their individual ideas, which is wholly separate from the general and culture-focused nature of the debate on linguistic relativity.

I never did such a thing.

Thus, the act of limiting the vocabulary one is able to use cannot be separated from that of limiting the ideas one can express.

hmm

There's the word "express" right there. Linguistic relativism and its negation still deals with internal perception.

But anyway, we're veering off-topic. So I'll go back to the post that kicked off this exchange, and point out that I was referring to authorities intentionally restricting language.

I'm really surprised this was never taken to court before. I'd assume the argument is that it would be "obscene," but there's a very strict set of definitions for what "obscene" actually means. For instance, SCOTUS doesn't even consider porn to be obscene enough to qualify.

So yeah, seems like a pretty clear 1st amendment violation to me.

Caped Baldy said:

Porn isn’t protected by the first amendment

>implying it's not

My home state never ceases to amaze me. When it comes to crime, politics, or laws.
Stay classy, Virginia.

This is one of the dumbest things that I've heard of in a while. What's next are they going to remove vulgar words from the dictionaries to protect the innocence of families with children? Its one thing to call the police on a repeating offender for being a disturbance, but to get fined for your words is stupid.

And what about double entendres? Arguing about the context of a sexual innuendo with the police or even before court must be so much more embarrassing and demeaning than hearing someone shout a swear word across the street.

I'm Canadian so this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You can give a 20 year old a gun for their birthday, but you can't cuss on the streets. I can't even…

This is stupid and remind me to never go to Virginia because let's be frank, I can't fucking afford it at this rate.

I'm not feeling well right now but tl;dr swearing harms no one, it does nothing and this is literally just the typical "think of the children" pandering bullshit. There's no reason for this except to protect jimmies from being rustled.

Curse words were created yet even though they are just words, people are training others to not use curse words. We give the curse words power, and that's just odd. Here is essentially what happened to humans when certain words became curse words:

--There are a group of apes in a cage, with a tree that contains bananas. One day, a scientist wants to test behavioral adaptation of the apes.

--When an ape climbs the tree to grab a banana, the scientist will shoot high-pressure water at every ape except the one who climbed the tree.

--Enough times hosed with water, the apes preemptively assault any ape that tries to climb the tree to get a banana.

--The scientist finally replaces one ape with a fresh one. The fresh ape attempts to climb a tree, but is assaulted by the other apes even though the fresh ape was not instructed that tree climbing was a no-no.

--The scientist replaces another ape with a fresh ape. The previously-fresh ape has been attuned to the behavioral training of the veteran apes that he too participates in assaulting the new ape when he tries to climb the tree.

--Enough apes are replaced by fresh apes that every ape was not native to the cage, but they all assault each other when one climbs a tree. even though they were not there to witness the creation of the rule that you cannot climb the tree, they assault any ape that tries to climb the tree

Wait, swearing in public is illegal in Virginia? Are you fucking kidding me? Sure, it's rude, but it's not worth making illegal! Even most other conservative states wouldn't do something as stupid as this!