Talk:Community standards

Community standards

Community standards as a legal term has little meaning outside of the obscenity tests described in the SCOTUS opinions in Roth v. United States and Miller v. California. The material I replaced lacked citations and seemed to be written based on a common-knowledge understanding of what "community standards" means. This being a project within the scope of WikiProject Law, I reasoned that a well referenced explanation of how the term is used within the context of the law would be an improvement. A sentence I found especially troubling was:

Critics argue that puritanical moralists have used community standards to wrongly punish minorities such as homosexuals or those in interracial marriages.

I found very little to indicate that the legal definition is used in this way; however, I did find one case in which a private religious institution justified expelling a student based on its supposed community standards, namely:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/25/former-student-sues-seminary-claiming-she-was-expelled-after-officials-obtained-tax

This could possibly be used as an example of how a non-lawyer's understanding of community standards impinges on actual legal rights and protections of certain individuals, but the way that Fuller Theological Seminary uses the term community standards does not appear to have any legal meaning. A.T.S. in Texas (talk) 05:41, 4 January 2020 (UTC)