Word: censorships
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Brewer chose to attack the Sunday censorship law on the grounds that it transgressed the right of freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment. To do so, be first had to prove that motion pictures were indeed a form of the press, but a number of decisions in courts throughout the country had indicated that such an assumption was acceptable before...
...laws prohibiting some activities on one day of the week could be defended, as they had been in the past, on the grounds that one day of rest each week was a health measure which any state could rightly force its citizens to observe. "But," he added, "to impose censorship of ideas in the guise of a law dedicated to rest and recreation is an abuse of the underlying Constitutional power. No law which assails our great Constitutional freedom on Sunday is either appropriate or valid...
...great weaknesses of the law which established the censorship machinery was the vague terms which it gave as a criterion for the censor to follow. All law had to say on this subject was that entertainment to be licensed must be "in keeping with the character of the day and not inconsistent with its due observance." In the famous "Miracle" case, the United States Supreme Court condemned a New York movie censorship law which forbade the showing of "sacrilegious films, as too vague to be enforced. Brewer argued that the same judgment applied equally well to the Massachusetts...
...court did not hand down its decision until July 6. But when it came, it said in blunt language that Brattle Films, Inc., had won without trouble. Justice Wilkins wrote in the decision, "We think that (the Sunday censorship law) is void on its face as a prior restraint on the freedom of speech and of the press guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments...It is unthinkable that there is a power, absent as to secular days, to require the submission to advance scrutiny by governmental authority of newspapers to be published on Sunday, or sermons to be preached...
When the Supreme Court of Massachusetts finished talking, the press started. "Censorship is dead," one Boston editorial announced. Associated Press stories proclaiming the victory over prudery ran in papers all over the country. But not all the reaction to the court decision was so noisy. The Commissioner of Public Safety, who never seemed too happy about acting as a censor anyway, quietly dismantled his screening room and went back to his main business of inspecting buildings. And without much fanfare, the Brattle Theatre finally showed Miss Julie...