ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 16, 1997 TAG: 9703170116
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
This week, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to a law intended to keep pornography off the Internet - and computer screens.
Over the past 20 years, the Supreme Court has quietly changed the face of many American cities.
Red-light districts of X-rated theaters, massage parlors and topless night clubs, which had flourished under the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, suddenly withered when the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that cities could use their zoning power to keep out sex-oriented businesses. The impact can be seen from the revival of New York City's Times Square to hundreds of cleaned-up downtowns across the country.
These days, however, red-light districts are coming back - on the Internet. Their fate comes before the Supreme Court on Wednesday in what First Amendment activists have called ``the first free-speech case of the 21st century.''
A worldwide electronic hookup, the Internet is a unique medium that facilitates an instant exchange of ideas and information. Its users, now estimated at 51 million in the United States and Canada alone, say it should be entirely free of government censorship.
``The future of the Internet is at stake in this case,'' said Jerry Berman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology and a leader of a free-speech coalition of computers users, librarians and university professors. ``It must be free, open and accessible to all.''
But anti-pornography activists protest that the Internet is becoming an open sewer. With only a few clicks or keystrokes, they say, the World Wide Web can become the Wide World of Sex, with brightly lit photos of nude models beckoning the screen scroller to come in for a look.
Commercial computer services usually demand that users pay by credit card, which generally excludes young people. But some user groups offer free access to an array of graphic pornography involving sex with animals, children and scenes of torture. And no one stands at the door to keep out kids.
``Any child with a computer can access vile pornography in a matter of seconds. And once they have seen it, it can never be erased from their minds,'' said Donna Rice Hughes, a leader of a Fairfax, Va.-based anti-porn group, Enough Is Enough.
A decade ago, Rice herself was imprinted on the national consciousness when her affair with Sen. Gary Hart derailed his presidential campaign. Now married with two stepchildren, she has become a national spokeswoman for a women's group that helped persuade Congress to pass the Communications Decency Act, which President Clinton signed into law last year as part of the bill deregulating the telecommunication industry.
The law makes it a federal crime, punishable by up to two years in prison, for anyone to ``use an interactive computer device to send [or] display ... to a person under years of age 18'' any image or communication that ``in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.''
Anti-pornography activists say the law simply brings the computer world into line with laws governing such other vices as smoking, drinking alcohol or gambling. Generally, these activities are regulated so that they are available to adults but not to minors.
The law has yet to go into effect. A federal judge in Philadelphia blocked it in February 1996, and a three-judge panel struck it down in June as unconstitutional.
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