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Groups Challenge Utah Harmful-to-Minors LawA group of 14 Utah bookstores, internet service providers, and free-speech groups filed a challenge June 9 in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City to the state’s new antiporn statute. The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression are among the plaintiffs.Signed into law March 21, the statute establishes an Adult Content Registry, to be compiled and maintained by the Utah Attorney General’s Office, of thousands of legal websites deemed harmful to minors. Internet users can request a service provider to either block these sites or offer filtering software; ISPs that do not comply face criminal misdemeanor charges as well as a fine of up to $10,000 for every day the material is not blocked. Rep. John Dougall (R-Highland), who sponsored the bill, said in the June 10 Provo Daily Herald that he was not surprised the ACLU filed the lawsuit. “The ACLU has a history of protecting pornographers, even when they are targeting children,” he said. The challenge cited similar harmful-to-minors legislation in nine others states—Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin—that federal or state courts have invalidated as unconstitutional. The groups said the Utah law is so broad that it quells citizens’ rights to free speech. The Freedom to Read Foundation noted in the lawsuit that adult library patrons and internet users will be deprived of access to such constitutionally protected library materials as “Forever by Judy Blume, Women on Top by Nancy Friday, Changing Bodies, Changing Lives by Ruth Bell, Our Bodies, Our Selves by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris.” Betsy Burton, owner of the King’s English online bookstore in Salt Lake City and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in the June 10 Salt Lake Tribune that she worries the attorney general could block her website if she displays the covers of such books as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. “These and other books we carry, when recommended online, could be described in ways that depict nudity and/or sexual content,” she said. “There is no practical way we can know when a minor is on our website or what he or she is looking at.” Posted June 10, 2005. |
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