ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, July 6, 1996 TAG: 9607080057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: Associated Press
The American Civil Liberties Union will file a lawsuit challenging a new state law that bans state workers from viewing sexually explicit material on the Internet, an ACLU official said Friday.
The General Assembly was trying to please a conservative constituency and put too little thought into the law that took effect July 1, said Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU in Virginia.
``In a free society, restrictions are usually imposed once it has been determined there has been an abuse. To my knowledge, there has been no study, no evidence of any sort that state employees are abusing the Internet,'' Willis said. ``This is classically stupid lawmaking.''
The legislature approved the measure during its winter session, and Gov. George Allen signed it into law. The only exception allows the state police to monitor the Internet for obscene material.
``The point of the whole thing is that the taxpayers should not be paying for state employees to access pornography over the Internet. If the state ACLU believes state workers should access pornography, maybe they should pay for it,'' said Ken Stroupe, Allen's press secretary.
``This is a typical liberal cause the ACLU takes on,'' he said.
The law prevents state employees on government time from accessing words or images ``depicting sexual bestiality, a lewd exhibition of nudity, sexual excitement, sexual conduct or sadomasochistic abuse, ... coprophilia, urophilia or fetishism.''
Existing law describes nudity as the fully exposed buttocks of males or females and women's breasts.
``In this case, the definition of what's sexually explicit is set at a juvenile level,'' Willis said. ``We're not talking about obscenity here, just simple nudity. There are literally thousands of books ... currently in possession of the state that violate this state law.''
Willis said the law would make criminals of professors doing research into problems of indecency on the Internet and any state worker who happens to stumble onto the wrong home page on the World Wide Web. He said worried state workers - many of them anonymous - had sent the ACLU copies of memos agency managers had distributed to explain the new law.
``You don't have to knowingly access this'' to violate the law, he said. ``For instance, an art historian could be downloading pictures to see what's on the market. ... A professor of contemporary literature may want to read some new prose. How do you know what's in this prose before you access it?''
Stroupe said the academic freedom arguments strain credibility.
``I am unaware of the need for any college professor to access pornography,'' Stroupe said. ``If ... someone accesses information by error, I am sure it would not be treated as a criminal offense. But as with any Web site, it's not just an issue of hitting one wrong key.''
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