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Some of the knee-jerk reactions to the comments made by Imus are getting to sound outright dangerous.

At a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing FCC Chairman Kevin Martin answered questions about the issue of regulating content.

Some of the questions really showed an ignorance of American law and court decisions. For example, Jose Serrano, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, pushed Martin to tell him why the FCC considers sexually explicit language "so much worse than degrading, racist language."

The question of course tried to make a point in asking it in the first place. The answer is that the FCC doesn't have that type of power. As a matter of fact, it is limited for the very purpose of not receiving the type of power that could regulate anything some fringe or special interests group would insist upon.

Martin added that the FCC is only empowered to regulate content that is based upon requirements in place that relate to existing children's programming and indecency rules. In other words, they can't just simply arbitrarily regulate whatever they feel like.

"The commission has very limited authority whenever we're talking about content issues," Martin said. "To say that something is or isn't indecent is not the same as saying that it wasn't offensive."

One representative, Carolyn Kilpatrick, a Democrat from Michigan, made the comment that Congress should seriously think about expanding the authority of the FCC to regulate offensive content.

What she said next about how indecency, profanity and obscenity is defined and "can be as large or as limited as we want to make it, and I think the FCC is very limited," is scary to say the least.

This is getting close to playing God by some. The politicians of our country starting to define what indecency, profanity and obscenity is, as far as offensive language goes, and then turning a government agency loose to enforce those definitions in a broad way, could destroy so much freedom it's almost unbelieveable to hear someone suggest it as a serious option in the United States.