- 1st AMENDMENT
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- April 23, 2001
VALENTI CALLS FOR PROTECTION OF FIRST AMENDMENT AND URGES STRENGTHENING OF MORAL SHIELD
- Las Vegas, NV, Monday,
April 23, 2001...In a keynote address at the National Association of Broadcasters
Convention, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) President and CEO Jack Valenti
noted “there is no right more crucial to the sustenance of liberty than the right to
speak up, to speak out, to tell a story, compose a song, write a book, paint a picture,
create a TV program, make a movie the way the creative artist chooses.”
Calling the First Amendment “the wisest and the most valuable design for democracy
ever put to paper,” Valenti stated that “of all the clauses in the Constitution,
it is the one clause that guarantees everything else in the greatest of documents ever
struck off by the hand and brain of man.”
Valenti said that as a First Amendment advocate, “You must allow that which you may
judge to be meretricious, squalid and without redeeming value, to enter the
marketplace.” He reminded the audience that the definition of that “glorious
Amendment means no matter how fiery the rhetoric, or how frenzied the debate, or how
calamitous the cry, government cannot interrupt nor intervene in the speech of its
citizens.”
Valenti said the world is being confronted by an avalanche of information through the
“Millennium of Communications” such as computers, cable, satellite, the
Internet, TV networks and stations, DVDs, and videocassettes. “Such an incessant
assault on our senses is bound to produce both the superior and the tawdry,” Valenti
said.
On ways for parents to protect their children, Valenti offered this suggestion: “But
as it was from the birth year of these United States to this hour, there are three
citadels which build within children a moral shield that teaches the child what is right
and what is plainly wrong. Once that shield is in place, it will rarely be penetrated by
unruly intrusions or the blandishments of peers. These three citadels are Home, Church and
School.”
“If parents, clerics and teachers treat their responsibility casually, if the
construction of that moral shield is feebly attended, then no law, no directive, no amount
of hand wringing will salvage that child’s conduct,” Valenti warned.
Valenti reiterated his personal commitment to “fortify the right of artists to create
what they choose without fear of government intervention of any kind, at any level, for
any reason.”
He closed with these words: “I want to stand with all other Americans who believe it
is their solemn duty to preserve, protect and defend 45 simple words, to lay claim for
generations of Americans yet unborn that the First Amendment means for them what it means
for us, the rostrum from which springs the ornaments and the essentials of this free and
loving land.”
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