Three Federal Judges Visit Internet Porn Sites in Communications Decency Case
Three federal judges, it was reported on this day, spent some of the last month and a half visiting pornography sites on the internet. According to the New York Times, some of the judges have visited Triple AAA Adult Entertainment and Bianca’s Smut Shack.
The occasion for the judges delving into web-based pornography was the appeal of a challenge to the federal Communications Decency Act (signed by President Bill Clinton on February 8, 1996), which made it a crime to knowingly make available “patently offensive” sexual materials via the internet to people under the age of 18.
A federal district court had declared the law a violation of the First Amendment in a challenge brought by the ACLU and a broad coalition of groups with an interest in freedom of expression on the internet. The Court of Appeals would uphold that decision, and the Supreme Court would affirm the two lower courts in Reno v. ACLU on June 26, 1997.
Read more on sex, indecency and censorship: Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (2000)
Watch former ACLU President Nadine Strossen discuss pornography and violence against women: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU7r_NZZUsw
Learn more about the myths and facts about pornography: Marcia Pally, Sense and Censorship: The Vanity of the Bonfires (1991), http://mediacoalition.org/files/Sense-and-Censorship.pdf
See a complete list of the plaintiffs in Reno v. ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/complete-list-aclu-v-reno-plaintiffs-and-their-affidavits