Those of you worried about an activist Supreme Court may want to consider how bad things could be. Reuters News reported yesterday that Pakistan's Supreme Court had intervened to order a pop singer to change the lyrics of one of his songs after a college girl complained that she was getting teased about them.
I can think of a lot of songs, or even entire genres of music, that I would like to see dealt with, but this is a very slippery slope. And I'm pretty sure that few Americans would want an institution like our Supreme Court to be the one that decided what was okay to listen to, given that the average justice is a white 70-year-old who is 89% male. (My statistical analysis could use some work, I guess, but you get the idea.) So this is a bad plan, generally speaking.
The Pakistani court didn't see it that way, though -- it seems to have intervened, possibly on its own initiative, after a girl whose name appeared in the lyrics wrote to a newspaper saying that male students were teasing her by singing the song. She said she had stopped going to college because of the harassment. The report said that the court "summoned" Abrar-ul-Haq and "asked" him to omit the name of the girl "and some other objectionable words in his lyrics." Haq said he would abide by the court's decision, which was probably a good choice.
Link: Yahoo! News
