for many purposes.  Much that we encounter offends our esthetic, if not our political and moral, sensibilities.  Nevertheless, the Constitution does not permit government to decide which types of otherwise protected speech are sufficiently offensive to require protection for the unwilling listener or viewer.  Rather, absent . . . narrow circumstances . . . the burden normally falls upon the viewer to avoid further bombardment of his sensibilities simply by averting his eyes.

422 U.S. at 210-11 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).  The state’s interest in protecting unwilling viewers from exposure to patently offensive material is accounted for, to some degree, by obscenity doctrine, which originated in part to permit the state to shield the unwilling viewer.  “The Miller standard, like its predecessors, was an accommodation between the State’s interests in protecting the sensibilities of unwilling recipients from exposure to pornographic material and the dangers of censorship inherent in unabashedly content-based laws.”  Ferber, 458 U.S. at 756 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also Miller, 413 U.S. at 18-19 ("This Court has recognized that the States have a legitimate interest in prohibiting dissemination or exhibition of obscene material when the mode of dissemination carries with it a significant danger of offending the sensibilities of unwilling recipients or of exposure to juveniles.”) (citation omitted).  To the extent that speech has serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, and therefore is not obscene under the Miller test of obscenity, the state’s interest in shielding unwilling viewers from such speech is tenuous.

Nonetheless, the Court has recognized that in certain limited circumstances, the state has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from unwilling exposure to speech that is not obscene.  This interest has justified restrictions on speech “when the speaker intrudes on the privacy of the home, or the degree of captivity makes it impractical for the unwilling viewer or auditor to avoid exposure.”  Erznoznik, 422 U.S. at 209 (citations omitted).  Thus, in FCC v.  Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), the Court relied on the state’s interest in shielding viewers’ sensibilities to uphold a prohibition against profanity in radio broadcasts:  Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual’s right to be left alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder.  Because the broadcast audience is constantly tuning in and out, prior warnings cannot completely protect the listener or viewer from unexpected program content.

Id. at 748 (citation omitted); accord Frisby v.  Schultz, 487 U.S. 474, 485 (1988) ("Although in many locations, we expect individuals simply to avoid speech they do not want to hear, the home is different."); see also Lehman v.  City of Shaker Heights, 418 U.S. 298, 302 (1974) (plurality opinion) (upholding a content-based restriction on the sale of advertising space in public transit vehicles and noting that “[t]he streetcar audience is a captive audience").