Senator Proposes Bill That Would Enact Nationwide Pornography Ban
Utah’s senior senator, having survived a reelection challenge from an independent candidate backed by state Democrats, is launching a two-pronged assault on companies that host pornography on their websites.
Mike Lee unveiled the twin pieces of legislation this past week, stating an intent to protect children online. One bill, dubbed “Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN)”, is clearly aimed at doing so, and would require such websites to ask users to provide their age before viewing content.
But a second piece of legislation introduced by the senator on the same day takes a much broader cudgel against pornographic content, and would remove a key protection that sexually explicit content currently enjoys in the United States.
As of right now, the right of Americans and others to share such content across state lines in the US (including online) is protected by the so-called “Miller Test”, a three-step test outlined by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in a 1973 ruling which determines when protected sexual content crosses the line into the unprotected realm of “obscenity”. Mr Lee’s legislation would eliminate one of those steps, specifically the one defining “obscenity” as content that “depicts or describes” sex “in a patently offensive way”.
Removing that language would mean that all sexual content, offensive or not, would fall into the unprotected definition of obscene content, which is prohibited from being transmitted across state lines, as well as between individuals in certain states. (Read more from “Senator Proposes Bill That Would Enact Nationwide Pornography Ban” HERE)
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
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