CARNAL NATION

Representative Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) was only four years old when H.L. Mencken died in 1956, but since then, he seems to have taken Mencken's famous definition of puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy" as a personal code to live by. After doing his level best to make sure that abortion would never again be paid for by health insurance, Stupak is moving on to censoring sexual websites. In the name of protecting the children, of course.

Stupak recently introduced legislation called the Online Age Verification and Child Safety Act, which would make online age verification mandatory for "any pornographic website accessible by any computer located within the United States to display any pornographic material, including free content that may be available to the purchase of a subscription or product." The penalty for selling adult products or services to a minor under the bill would be a fine and imprisonment for up to ten years.

In addition, financial entities like PayPal or credit-card companies would also be responsible for making sure that their services weren't used for non-age verified transactions.

Stupak's legislation has inevitably been compared to the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA), which attempted to force commercial sites with content that was deemed "harmful to minors" to restrict access to their sites. COPA's definition of material that was "harmful" was much broader than standard conceptions of obscenity, a fact which ultimately led to its downfall. Several courts found COPA to be overly broad in scope and unnecessary due to the existence of alternative methods, such as parental use of filtering software. After ten years of legal battles, finally died this January when the Supreme Court declined to revisit the case for what would have been the third time.

Adult Video News quotes Free Speech Coalition Board Chair Jeffrey Douglas as saying that the law is "facially unconstitutional" and that it stands virtually no chance of sustaining a legal challenge. For that matter, Douglas says that the bill itself is little more than posturing by Stupak that will go nowhere in the House. "Often, bills are introduced solely for the purpose of impact on constituency, by saying 'Look what I am doing,' even though no one has any belief that it has any vitality whatsoever. This appears to me to be one of those." Although Stupak introduced the bill on November 6, as of this writing, he has no co-sponsors.