Objective measures of civil liberty are not the point. The 1st Amendment doesn't need fixing. The 1st Amendment may not have freed a single slave, but it sure as hell protected the voices of abolitionists.
You want to defend fmr. AG Gonzales's prosecutorial priorities- Tommy Chong, anyone?- knock yourself out, but again I'm not sure the gaggle of goons that comprised the upper echelons of the Bush II administration are really the most shining examples of respect for our Constitutional system. The reality there, is (thanks, google 
) that no one went to jail for THAT video, apparently, and it's not like that dude invented cinematic coprophagy in the first place (Pasolini, helloooo?)
...What Gonzales of course missed in his apparent misguided anti-obscenity salvos, is the Streisand effect, to which more people no doubt know about that video - and have seen it, although I'm not going there, you're welcome to - than ever would have if he hadn't used the resources of the DOJ to go after said nasty smut-producer. In short, whatever anti-"obscenity" shutdowns of speech may apply in theory, in actuality it seems the thing is readily findable on the intertubes.
If, you know, you're into that sort of thing.
As for Canada, speaking of Porn, when they adopted Catherine MacKinnon's ideas about saving women and society from oppressive heteronormative smutty-smut, oddly enough some of the first material that was censored was Lesbian porn. Which sort of dials back into this idea that however well-intentioned (or not) these pleas to "just let us restrict the BAD speech!!!!!!!!", the fact of the matter is those tools can- and, almost invariably will- be used to restrict the speech of the oppressed, the radical, the subversive, or the unpopular.
The Marketplace did prefer VHS over betamax, so we ended up with VHS. I realize beta was technically a better format, but beyond that who cares? We survived.
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