There's no single article on this, so let's touch on the three big Moral Panics folks remember from the 80s and 90s (there were more, for instance, the "Repressed Memories / Daycare Sexual Abuse" moral panic but that didn't get into censorship.
So, let's start at the top with the
Dungeons and Dragons moral panic of the 1980s. Firstly, this panic never got so far as to spawn any legislation, but did serve as a major poisoning point between Geekdom and the Religious Right (which is kinda sad really, seeing how fantasy as a genre has considerable roots in worldviews that align closely with the religious right and the Grandfather and Godfather of modern fantasy (Tolkien and Lewis) are both lionized by the religious right). Firstly, the moral panic around DnD chiefly started with the disappearance of
James Egbert and its fictionalization in the novel
Mazes and Monsters by
Rona Jaffe in 1981. Those involved in the Egbert suicide and investigation were entirely politically unmotivated as far as I can tell. Later, after Irving Pulling, a gamer, commited suicide in 1982
his mother fixated on RPGs as the cause of his death and formed the advocacy group "B.A.D.D." While she certainly took a religious stance against DnD, by herself she wasn't very visible, no, it was the mainstream media special on 60 Minutes that catapulted it all into the public consciousness along with the 1982
made for TV movie based on the aforementioned novel that pushed it into full blown moral panic mode. Even in the 1980s one would be hard pressed to call Hollywood and the media bastions of social conservatives, though I will admit that the ideas did catch on much more within the religious right, but thus, the origin of the moral panic and propagation of it was distinctly bipartisan.
The next big moral panic was the
Dirty Music Panic of the 1980s and early 90s. This one is pretty easy to show how it was bipartisan, since one of the chief pushers of this panic was the
Parents Music Resource Center, which was founded by the wives of four politicians and doners, the politicians were from across the political spectrum, but most notably
Tipper Gore, wife of then Democratic senator and later Vice President Al Gore.
Finally, let's dig into the
Video Game Panic of the late 90s and early 00s. There can be no denying that the right wing was involved here as
Jack Thompson is clearly a member of the religious right. However, despite Thompson being the face, there was considerable involvement from some very prominent left wing individuals. The most notable instance of this was the push for the
Family Entertainment Protection Act, which was a bill basically to force rating onto the video game industry and otherwise censor them. The person who introduced the bill? Then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. It's cosponsors? All Democrats. If that's not showcasing just how bipartisan this issue was, consider this, in 2011 the
US Supreme Court struck down the California law restricting the sale of video games to minors and formally extending 1st Amendment protections to Video Games in a 7-2 decision, written by Scalia. The two dissenting opinions? One by Thomas (a conservative) and the other by Breyer (a Liberal). But that case brings us to my earlier statement about it being liberals who passed the laws, you see the California law in question was brought forward by the now infamous
Leland Yee, a Democrat. In 2005
both houses of the
California government were held by Democrats and while the
governator was a Republican, nobody would seriously call him a conservative.
No, you're just making excuses. Remind me, who exactly championed things like Blue Laws and fought tooth and nail to keep them? "Leaves other men free to live by their conscience, secure in their private lives" my ass.
