O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave. O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Those are the last two lines of America’s national anthem. Our children learn the song very early on in school and we sing it at just about every sporting event, but are the words really true? Oh, I’m sure we’re still plenty brave, but how free are we, really? Just how did the men that signed the Declaration of Independence interpret ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?

Lately, a minority of people in the U.S. who think they have the right to tell everyone else how to live have decided that grown adults just aren’t capable of making their own decisions and shouldn’t have the right to do certain things — even if they do them in the privacy of their own homes — and are making some alarming progress in dictating what we’re allowed to view or do on the Internet. If they don’t like it no one should be able to do it and if they have their way, so-called free Americans won’t be able to look at porn or have a little fun playing poker, soon.

PartyPoker.com has announced that U.S. residents will no longer be able to participate on their website due to the passing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The law went into effect when it was signed by the President on October 13, 2006. Here’s an excerpt from their announcement.

Dear Player,

As anticipated, the President of the United States has signed into law the SAFE Port Act. This act contains certain provisions known as “The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006″. After taking extensive legal advice, we have concluded that the new law will make it practically impossible to provide U.S. players with access to PartyGaming’s real money poker and other real money gaming sites.

This law is the first piece of federal legislation to deal specifically with Internet gaming, and it signifies the U.S. government’s intention to stop the flow of money from Americans to online gaming operators such as PartyGaming through criminal sanction.

So, it’s okay for little old blue-haired ladies to play Bingo at their local church, but I can’t sit in my living room and play Texas Holdem on the Internet.

You can read the entire Party Poker statement here.

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