The Supreme Court yesterday cleared the way for enforcement of a federal law designed to shield children from "dial-a-porn" telephone services, refusing to hear arguments that the law infringes on free speech.
The court, without comment, rejected a challenge to a 1989 law that requires telephone companies to block access to the sexually explicit messages unless customers ask -- in advance and in writing -- to receive them.
The law, known as the Helms Amendment, was enacted after the court struck down Congress's previous attempt to go after the dial-a-porn business. In that case, Sable Communications v. Federal Communications Commission, the court recognized the importance of protecting minors from being exposed to such messages but said an outright ban on dial-a-porn went too far. Congress then swiftly passed the amendment offered by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).
In the case the court refused to hear yesterday, Dial Information Services Corporation of New York v. Barr, four dial-a-porn firms attacked the Helms Amendment as a violation of their freedom of speech.
Although "the indecent speech here at issue may to some be considered offensive," they told the court, an appeals court ruling upholding the statute "broadly and unnecessarily curtailed -- if not destroyed -- adult access to lawful, protected speech."
The law has not been enforced while the case was pending.
The companies said their services should be available except to households where customers ask to have calls to such numbers blocked.
The Justice Department, defending the law, argued that such voluntary blocking did not go far enough "in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors."
It noted that a study, cited by the federal appeals court in New York in upholding the law, found that, even after voluntary blocking had been available in the New York area for two years, only 4 percent of the region's 4.6 million residential telephone laws had been blocked.
"That state of affairs did not result from voluntary choices by parents," the department added, since half the residential customers did not know about the availability of dial-a-porn or the means to block it.
Quoting from another dial-a-porn case, the department said requiring dial-a-porn consumers to subscribe in advance is no different from "requesting admittance at a box office to an adult movie or requesting a copy of an adult magazine kept under the counter in a plain brown wrapper at the convenience store."
In a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to hear the case, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay rights group, said the services provide "risk-free sexual satisfaction" in the midst of the AIDS crisis and, for many gay people, "offer an opportunity to engage in intimate adult communication while retaining a deeply desired and guarded anonymity."