Posted Sunday, June 29, 1997

The elected officials of the United States don't seem to get it. Two days or so after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the so-called "Communications Decency Act", a spate of legal bluster is again underway.

The latest eye- and ear-catcher is Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and her promised "Child-safe Internet Act of 1997." Sen. Murray is quoted in a post on news.com as saying that no one wants to come home from work and find his or her child downloading pornography off the Internet.

True enough.

I have a question for Sen. Murray (and the rest of our elected officials who are hot to censor the Internet): Where is the adult in the household who is supposed to be supervising this child, who, by implication, is left alone to unleash the terrors of cyber child-snatchers and smut or to watch endless unsupervised hours of mind-rotting advertising and gratuitous violence on television?

Our government seems hell-bent on co-opting an international publishing, communication and research medium and turning it into The Family Channel (a "wholesome" cable television network, for those readers unfamiliar with it).

Sen. Murray proposes to drag in the Federal Communications Commission so as to develop a rating system for online material, perhaps similar to that used by the motion picture industry. She would also require browser manufacturers to put warning labels on their product similar to those found on packs of cigarettes.

Persons found guilty of posting "vulgar" comments on the Internet would be prosecuted.

Please define "vulgar," Sen. Murray. One person's art is another person's smut. Haven't we just been through this? Will you guys *ever* get it? Community standards vary, as do personal tastes. The Internet is not a broadcast medium, nor was it originally designed for children. Filtering technology exists, even if less-than-perfect, to protect kids from smut.

There's an even better solution than filters: supervise your children. Many American parents seem to now expect the U. S. government to raise their children for them. These same parents think nothing of the thousands of murders and acts of mayhem their children watch every day and every night on television, yet become hysterical over depictions of body parts which are not related to a mass shoot-out.

If you don't want to look at it, don't look at it. If you don't want your kids to look at it, supervise your kids -- don't abandon them to a PC by themselves for hours on end. In the meantime, quit wasting taxpayers' dollars on more proposed legislation that smells unconstitutional from at least a hundred miles away.