Parenting & Family Quote by Orrin Hatch

Hatch frames free speech as a kind of civic religion gone feral: an "altar" demanding human sacrifice. Its brilliance, and its danger, is how it makes censorship sound like rescue. By yoking the First Amendment to imagery of children and families, he borrows the emotional authority of protection and redirects it toward regulation. The move isn’t subtle. It’s meant to end the conversation before it starts: if you object, you’re not defending constitutional principle, you’re volunteering kids for the knife.

The subtext is a familiar Washington bargain. Hatch isn’t arguing against speech rights in general; he’s carving a moral exception large enough to drive legislation through, while presenting it as constitutional housekeeping. "Obscene material that is not protected" is doing heavy rhetorical labor. It reassures moderates that this is not a First Amendment fight at all, just enforcement of already-settled doctrine. But the ambiguity sits in the seams: obscenity is a notoriously squishy category in U.S. law, and "community standards" (a phrase that echoes the Miller test) can mean anything from local sensibility to organized moral crusade. The vagueness is a feature, not a bug, because it allows political actors to expand the perimeter of what counts as harmful.

Context matters: Hatch was a major voice in late-20th-century Republican moral politics, when pornography, media "decency", and culture-war anxieties were being translated into federal pressure campaigns and regulation. The quote is designed to convert a constitutional limit on government into a mandate for government, by insisting the only alternative is social collapse.