Description

Obscene content falls in the category of speech unprotected by First Amendment guarantees. Over the 20th century, content from The Grapes of Wrath to hip hop music has been punished as obscene by various state and local authorities, and the Supreme Court has been asked repeatedly to evaluate it. In the 1957 Roth v. United States case, the SCOTUS established that test of obscenity was to determine "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest." In 1972, the Court modified this test in their Miller v. California ruling, determining that in addition to the Roth question, evaluators must ask whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Offensive content that appears in television or radio broadcasts can be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission under their indecency guidelines even if it it not considered obscene.