Utah Takes the Porn Challenge

The American Civil Liberties Union is trying to pour a little vinegar into the land of milk and honey.

The group yesterday filed a lawsuit in federal court against Utah's new Internet pornography law, claiming that it is unconstitutional.

Here's what Utah's law does, according to the Provo Herald:

The state attorney general must create a database of Web sites containing "material harmful to minors."

Internet service providers must use filters -- checked annually by the Utah Division of Consumer Protection -- to keep children from seeing the sites. ISPs must offer the filters by 2006. If they don't, they risk paying fines up to $10,000 a day.

Internet content publishers and ISPs would be subject to the state's harmful-to-minors law, which would expose them to felony charges if they violate it.

Among the plaintiffs, the Herald reported, are small service providers Mountain Wireless Utah LLC and Computer Solutions International Inc., as well as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The Salt Lake Tribune included this quote from a local bookseller: "'There are a lot of books that are harmful to minors. And they're not all about sex,' said Sam Weller Zion Bookstore owner Tony Weller, who worries the law will quash his bookstore's Web site if Web users are offended by the covers and subjects of particular books."

What kinds of books? You know, the English Lit seminar kind written by coffee-house liberals sporting frizzy hair, shades and berets. See the Associated Press story: "Betsy Burton, owner of The King's English Bookshop and one of the 14 plaintiffs, said such a list could include her Web site because it links to descriptions and jacket art for books like Margaret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake,' whose cover depicts female bodies in the nude." (Don't click on this link if you're thinking of going to Salt Lake City to picket in favor of the state's lawsuit.)

It is the latest court battle over what is the right way to prevent children from finding sexually explicit content on the Internet while keeping it available to adults. I say "latest" because Congress and the nation's statehouses have failed to pass a law that can do this without trampling other rights. The AP sums it up nicely, noting that similar laws in Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin were struck down for a variety of reasons.

You can't blame elected officials for trying time and again to make some headway with this subject. Who could resist seeking the grail-like distinction of being the one who discovered how to keep kids from seeing online pornography, without bending, folding, tearing and mutilating the Bill of Rights? It's not just a goal that everyone can agree with, it's one that seems achievable in an age when people like me in our blue-state enclaves note the thousands of scarlet miles between New York and L.A.

It's the kind of climate that allows the law's sponsor, state Rep. John Dougall, R-Highland, to say things like this (quoted in the Herald): "The ACLU has a history of protecting pornographers, even when they're targeting children." Dougall's comment reveals a devil-may-care attitude toward the Constitution that could result in many kinds of protected speech being ruled illegal. The tragedy there is that many people think it's okay if some works of art get caught in a net designed to block porn. To them it's regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage.

It's not collateral; it's unacceptable. And most hardcore conservatives -- never mind that strange combination of adjective and noun -- are big enough defenders of constitutional rights to know that laws like Utah's don't work. Hopefully the judges at the U.S. District Courthouse in Salt Lake City will concur.