ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606170019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
WHEN everybody can be a publisher, everybody should be able to freely express thoughts and opinions without their nosy old Uncle Sam scrutinizing every word or image for its propriety - or requiring a host of nannies to keep watch for him.
Yet that is what the Communications Decency Act demands as a way to protect children from the nasties on the Internet. This ill-conceived law - with language inserted by 6th District Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte - is part of the massive revision of federal telecommunications laws passed by Congress earlier this year.
Last week, a federal district court panel found the government's argument to limit speech on the Internet "profoundly repugnant to First Amendment principles," and blocked enforcement of the act. An appeal is as likely as is continued political pandering on the issue of "indecency."
For now, though, the Philadelphia District Court's injunction can be counted as an important first victory for the free-speech rights of a free people. With it, the judges extended First Amendment protections to the Internet, an essential guarantee for the most democratic medium ever available.
The act's proscriptions against displaying "indecent" or "patently offensive" words or images are vague and unenforceable. Patently offensive to whom? To innocent children, supposedly. So, are adults to write and read nothing on the Net that would be unsuitable at a day-care center?
"The First Amendment should not be interpreted to require us to entrust the protection it affords to the judgment of prosecutors," wrote the judges grandly.
Mom and Dad, not Uncle Sam, are responsible for screening what their children see, and they have a host of software, designed to block objectionable material, to help them.
Federal statutes against child pornography and obscenity can be enforced without inhibiting a free and open, at times indelicate, exchange of ideas on the worldwide computer network.
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB