use speakers to remain silent rather that communicate even arguably unlawful words, ideas and images. The governments argument was that because the CDAs indecency language overlaps a section of the three-part Miller standard used in obscenity prosecutions, the law is not vague. Both the CDA and Miller standard hold that the material in question must be patently offensive under contemporary community standards. Reno v. ACLU leaves obscenity laws alone and deals only with the issue of non-obscene indecent speech. The Court said that a term that is not vague in context might be vague when standing alone. It explained in footnote thirty-eight: Even though the word trunk, standing alone, might refer to luggage, a swimming suit, the base of a tree, or the long nose of an animal, its meaning is clear when it is one prong of a three-part description of a species of gray animals. The Justices concluded that the CDA unquestionably silences some speakers whose messages would be entitled to constitutional protection.Stopping the CDA was the reason the case came into being, but the Justices did not cease there. They also reversed the ruling of Pacifica v. FCC, popularly known as the Seven Dirty Words case, from twenty years ago. Until Pacifica, the Court had always justified censorship of radio and television based on a doctrine known as spectrum scarcity. In other words, the governments role in assigning frequencies in the scarce broadcast spectrum led to a role in reviewing content as well. In Pacifica, the Court labeled these mediums as pervasive and said that was why the government could censor. The Court defines radio and television as pervasive because it comes into the household, and that children turning a dial may stumble on indecent programming, thus justifying the censorship of indecent speech. Ithiel de Sola Pool, a communications scholar, wrote in 1983 that the pervasiveness doctrine would someday be used to justify quite rad...
