The Clinton Administration wants the Supreme Court to reinstate a law blocking children from the Playboy Channel and other sexually explicit cable television networks.
The law was a Congressional bid to limit sexually-explicit programming available on cable to children "with merely a flip of the dial," argued Justice Department attorney James Feldman before the high court Tuesday. But an attorney for the Playboy Entertainment Group, Robert Corn-Revere, called the 1996 law by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein "a case of regulatory overkill" restricting programming even to households which have no children.
The Feinstein law allowed sex-oriented cable programming only during overnight hours if the signal wasn't fully scrambled for subscribers. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the law went too far by late June, according to the Associated Press.
Feldman argued the justices should compare the Feinstein bill's free speech limits with "the evil it's addressing." But Justice John Paul Stevens said the bill seemed to cover even cable channels that are not sex oriented. ``We see an awful lot of strong language on WGN (the Chicago-based cable superstation),'' Stevens said. ``I'm often shocked at what I see on television.''
The law was enacted as part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Playboy challenged the law as a First Amendment violation. A federal court struck it down in December 1998, noting another part of the law already requires cable operators to completely block any channel upon a customer's request, and that that is a less-restrictive alternative to barring all daytime adult programming, the AP says.
