[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 96 (Friday, July 17, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8450-S8452]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY

  Mr. COATS. Madam President, shortly I hope, before the Senate 
adjourns for the weekend, the majority leader will be propounding some 
unanimous consent requests. Those requests are designed to set in place 
the procedures by which we will move forward next week and the 
legislation which we will take up.
  One of those unanimous consent requests will involve two pieces of 
legislation, one which I have offered, and the second which has been 
offered by the Senator from Arizona, Senator McCain, which deals with 
the question of pornography on the Internet.
  There is a history to this. In the last Congress, Senator Exon and I 
cosponsored legislation which introduced our colleagues for the first 
time to the dark side of the Internet; that side of the Internet that 
is not used for educational purposes, is not used for valid 
communication purposes, but which is designed to lure people into the 
practice of ordering and paying for pornographic images, words, and 
films, and other forms of pornography across the Internet. We know our 
first amendment prohibits our eliminating that and banning it. The 
right of free speech gives the right of adults to click into that, pay 
for that, subscribe to that, and to order that as long as that material 
is not deemed obscene. Even though it is indecent, and many of us would 
classify it as obscene, it has to be a standard set by the Supreme 
Court in upholding the first amendment. It is one of the perhaps dark 
sides of the first amendment.
  But we all understand that battle. And that is not what this battle 
is about. This battle is about protecting children from access to that 
material, which most of us would turn our heads from, or say that is 
enough, were we given the opportunity to look at it. In fact, all of 
the noble first amendment arguments that were raised during the debate 
in the last Congress against the bill that was offered by Senator Exon 
and myself melted away as Senator Exon invited Members into the 
Democrat cloakroom, both Republicans and Democrats, to view images that 
were copied from the Internet, and said, ``Did you realize this 
material is simply a click away on your Internet?'' At that time, the 
Internet was pretty new. People were still discovering it. Most of us 
had not even signed up, or even knew what it was.
  Members were shocked at what they saw, because what they saw was not 
the centerfold of Playboy Magazine. But what they saw was some of the 
most despicable, some of the most brutal, some of the most sadistic, 
some of the most sexually explicit material they have ever witnessed--
young children being sexually exploited, bestiality, women being 
sexually exploited. I don't want to go into graphic detail here. But it 
was enough to convince the Senate that we ought to move on it and move 
on it right away.
  So it passed, despite again the pleas for first amendment freedom. 
That legislation, authored by Senator Exon and myself, passed the U.S. 
Senate by a vote of 84 to 16. It was adopted by the House in exactly 
the Senate form, went to the President, the President signed it, signed 
it with a fair amount of publicity about the need to take action on 
this to protect minors, to protect children from this access.
  We had a standard in there--an indecency standard that was copied in 
the exact language that the Supreme Court approved for the dial-a-porn 
bill that went through and survived the Supreme Court review, and was 
declared constitutional even though actions were filed against it.
  We thought that since the Court approved it for telephone 
pornography, surely they would approve it for video pornography and 
pornography that came across the Internet. Picking up the phone is not 
a whole lot different than turning on the computer. Both are invasive. 
Both come into the home. Do they require some action on the part of the 
participant? Yes. You have to pick up the phone when it rings. You have 
to dial a 900 number. There is the luring of that.
  Again, we are saying that first amendment prohibits us from 
prohibiting adults from doing that. But the Court has upheld in the 
past, and they did in the dial-a-porn case, reasonable restrictions in 
terms of children having to prove that they were adults. And, if they 
couldn't prove that through verification of a credit card, or other 
means, then the material was not allowed to be passed on to them.
  The Court said the computer is not the same as the telephone. The 
computer isn't as invasive as the telephone. Well, the Court needs to 
understand the computer. I wrote that off to a generational problem--a 
generation of individuals. Maybe I oversimplify this. But I do not know 
how to better explain it, because it is the only possible explanation I 
could come up with as to why the Court made a distinction

[[Page S8451]]

between a dial-a-porn standard and the computer standard. I don't think 
they understood exactly what the computer does and how accessible it is 
and what the Internet was, at least at that time. I think they know 
now. Maybe I underestimate the Court. Maybe there are other reasons.
  In any event, as we know now, whether you are in the classroom, 
whether you are in the school library, whether you are in your study 
hall, or whether you are in your dorm room in boarding school, or 
whether you are at home in your bedroom, or your den, or your family 
room, the computer is there, and a click away is the most lurid 
material we have ever seen available to children and adults, simply 
with the warning you have to be an adult to access this material and 
that is it. You click here if you agree, and we send you the material.

  I am going to describe as we get into the bill some of the effects 
this has had on our culture, on our society, and particularly on our 
children. My purpose here today is to plead with my Democrat colleagues 
to allow us to bring this bill to the floor. We have revised the bill 
that the Supreme Court struck down to comply with their objections, to 
address the question of the standard which we have changed from the 
indecency standard to the harmful-to-minor standard. The harmful-to-
minor standard was the standard the Court laid out in the Ginsberg 
case, and we have taken that word for word.
  Second, we have restricted this, as the Court ordered that we had to 
do in order to meet the constitutional test, to the World Wide Web, to 
the commercial selling and display of these images, rather than private 
conversations, e-mail, chat rooms where individuals are engaging in 
this kind of activity.
  That is not how I wanted to draft the bill, but in order to get a 
court to uphold what is clearly the will of the American people as 
expressed by their representatives in an overwhelming vote in the 
Senate and unanimous acceptance in the House of Representatives and 
declarations by the President of the United States that the 
administration stands foursquare behind this, we find ourselves back 
here having to narrow the bill in order to survive court muster.
  That is what we have done. We have worked with constitutional experts 
to make sure that we have done it correctly, that we comply with the 
Court, and we want to give them another chance. We want to give them 
another chance, hopefully with a better understanding of the impact of 
the Internet, both positive and negative. And as I said, there is a 
dark side to the Internet, particularly as it relates to children, and 
we are trying to address that.
  Now, for several months I have been searching for ways to bring this 
legislation to the floor. It was introduced and referred to the 
Commerce Committee. It was debated there and passed out of that 
committee on a 19 to 1 vote.
  Some had said, look, the solution to this problem is the software 
packages that are being developed by the industry that parents can buy 
and attach to their computer or integrate into their computer and that 
will solve the problem and block the images.
  That is a partial solution to the problem but not a complete solution 
to the problem because the changing technology, the proliferation of 
web sites is so fast that no software can keep up with it. The 
ingenuity of the pornographers, the sellers of pornography is such that 
even the most innocent of words are now linked to a means by which 
pornography is pulled up. If you want to find out about Disney World or 
Disney movies or Disney characters, the pornographers have found a way 
to use the term ``Disney'' and click right into pornography. If you 
want to look up Boy Scouts, horses, dogs, cats, women, men, marriage, 
you name it, seemingly the most innocent of words, you are now linked 
directly to pornography. Why? Because the pornographers have discovered 
that this software is attempting to block the explicit language and 
they want to try to find a way in which to commercially entice people 
who are searching in other areas to be presented with this information 
so they can click into it.
  So what happened there, then, was Senator McCain's software bill and 
my Internet pornography bill were both passed out of committee. Senator 
McCain and I agreed that both are necessary to address the problem and 
that we would agree to go forward with these together. In recognition 
of the work that needed to be done in the Senate, we wanted to pursue a 
process by which we would agree to a time limit. We would agree to 
others offering any amendments that they thought appropriate. We would 
debate those, have a vote on those, let Congress express its will and 
go forward.

  This was not an attempt to tie up the Senate. In fact, we have been 
overly cooperative. I wish we had not been so cooperative. We were 
promised this would come forward. In defense of the majority leader, I 
think he has made a good-faith effort to try to bring this forward. But 
in each instance other circumstances have arisen, primarily the 
inability to get the consent of some Members of this body to allow us 
to proceed with this bill, debate it, amend it, vote on it, and either 
send it on or vote it down, whatever was the majority disposition. That 
is what we have been attempting to do.
  We are frustrated--I am frustrated; I am terribly frustrated--in our 
inability to take something that I think has overwhelming support to at 
least bring it up and talk about it. It seems that every time we get 
ready to go forward with a unanimous consent request to bring the bill 
up, we are notified that someone has put a hold on the bill. We find 
out who that is. We go over and talk to them. We offer them--they say, 
well, we want to offer an amendment on it. Fine. We will add your 
amendment to the unanimous consent agreement. Take whatever time you 
want on it. We will lock in an amount of time. We will give you a vote. 
We will eliminate second degrees. We do not want to do anything to 
cause you not to have an up-or-down debate on your amendment. That 
person agrees.
  We go back to the majority leader and say we are all clear; we are 
ready to go. Whoops, here comes another hold. Somebody else has a 
problem. We solve that. Now it is a problem on the McCain bill. The 
next one is a problem on the Coats bill. We solve both of those. The 
next one is a problem on the McCain bill. We solve that. We think we 
are ready to go. Whoops, another problem on the Coats bill.
  We are running around putting out fires, and we start to wonder if we 
don't have some kind of rolling hold process going on here where there 
has been a decision to block this legislation from coming forward, and 
we just simply pass on the baton of objection to different people who 
say; ``Time is on our side. If we delay long enough, we will get into 
the appropriations process and we will block this and we will get 
through the year and we won't have had to deal with it.''
  I don't want to ascribe that motive to the other side, and that is 
why I am making this statement today because I just want to offer to my 
Democrat colleagues: if you have a problem with this bill, offer your 
amendment. I am not here to block your amendment. I am not here to 
block debate on your amendment. I am not here to block a vote on your 
amendment. I am not here to modify your amendment. I am here to simply 
say let's discuss the issue, debate it, vote on it, and move on.
  We have spent 4 weeks on the tobacco bill, and I understand, that was 
an important issue and that blocked a lot of other legislation. I 
understand that we have appropriations bills backed up, and we need to 
move forward on those, which is why we are willing to do a limited time 
agreement on this. But we cannot move forward, and are going to be 
forced to have to offer this to appropriations bills in order to get 
the Senate to consider it--offer it as an amendment, unless we can get 
agreement to bring this up, debate it with a time certain and move on. 
I do not want to do that. I do not want to interfere with Senator 
Stevens and the appropriators' efforts to do the business of the 
Congress that needs to be done. I understand things are backed up 
because of the tobacco bill. We heard a lot of great speeches in that 
tobacco bill about first amendment rights needing to be waived, why the 
first amendment did not apply as it involved advertising on tobacco.
  But we are not getting that same kind of flexibility and 
understanding from some of our colleagues as it applies to pornography. 
I think I would challenge those Members who think

[[Page S8452]]

the first amendment is sacrosanct, that we cannot move forward with 
this, to ask themselves the question: Why is it OK to waive first 
amendment rights and not apply the first amendment to those commercial 
entities who are using the symbol of Joe Camel because that is so 
destructive to the health and welfare of our children, but when it 
comes to bestiality, when it comes to some of the worst forms of 
pornography that is wide open on the worldwide web and available to our 
children with the click of a mouse, that, oh, no, the first amendment 
must apply here? We have to be purists on this?
  I ask my colleagues to ask themselves as parents, and ask the parents 
they represent in their States, what those parents think is the higher 
priority issue. If they are given the choice, are they more worried 
about their children modifying their behavior and taking up smoking 
because they see a 5-second image of Joe Camel? Or, are they more 
worried about their children modifying their behavior and responding in 
a way because they have been able to view some of the most crass, 
indecent, and, in my opinion, obscene sexual images that we have ever 
seen? I think the resounding response is going to be: Senator, let's do 
first things first; let's address the problems that are real problems.
  So I conclude by pleading with my colleagues to let us resolve 
whatever problems you have with our going forward with this. We have 
been trying to do this. We have hotlined this 2 weeks ago. Both sides 
know what we are trying to do. If people have a problem, we will 
resolve that problem. But I hope there will not be an objection to 
going forward with that today when the majority leader propounds his 
unanimous consent request to allow us to go forward with this bill.
  If there is an objection--after 2 weeks of hotlines, after 2 weeks of 
going to Members saying, ``If you want an amendment, have an amendment, 
but at least allow us to debate the bill''--I can only conclude there 
is some effort here to prevent us from even talking about it, even 
bringing the bill up. We have an opportunity to avoid all that today 
very shortly when that unanimous consent request is propounded. I trust 
we will be able to do that.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gorton). The Senator from Utah.

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