Congress has adjourned, ending a session that will long be remembered by booksellers as the one in which members of the House seriously debated a bill making it a felony to sell a book with violent content to a minor. ABFFE helped defeat that bill and another measure that created a rating system for audio and video products. Under the ratings bill, a bookseller could have been fined $10,000 for selling a minor an audiobook with violent content.

	Michigan School District Bans Classroom Readings of Harry Potter Supreme Court Hears Playboy Challenge to Law Banning "Signal Bleed" Michigan Legislators Mulls Sweeping Definition of "Adult" Bookstores ABFFE Adds Greg Gibson's "Gone Boy" to Violence Reading List ABFFE Picks for December Previous ABFFE Updates

However, the threat of censorship of violent content will return when Congress opens a new session in January. A conference committee of the House and Senate will resume consideration

of a juvenile justice bill that contains troubling provisions, including an anti-trust exemption that is intended to encourage media companies to meet and agree to engage in self-censorship of "offensive" material.

State legislatures will join Congress in considering censorship legislation when they open in January. Most legislatures were in their final days when the Columbine shootings occurred and did not participate in the panic over media violence that affected Congress. They are expected to make up for their tardiness by considering a wide variety of bills to prevent minors from getting access to violent and other "offensive" material.

Michigan School District Bans Classroom Readings of Harry Potter

The conflict over the Harry Potter books shows no sign of ending soon. The parents, teachers and librarians who love the books want to continue to use them to encourage a love for reading.

The critics continue to insist that the books do not belong in the classroom. (Some complain that they promote witchcraft; others that they encourage disrespect for adults; and still others that they are too violent.) Most of these disputes have been settled by allowing students to use different books for their reading assignments and excusing them when the Potter books are read aloud in class.

However, this solution does not satisfy Gary L. Feenstra, the superintendent of schools in Zeeland, Michigan. Material read aloud in class should "not be controversial to any student," he declared in a November 22 memo. Therefore, there will be no more Potter readings in the Zeeland schools.

Feenstra also pulled the Potter books from the shelves of school libraries. They may be checked out only by students in grades five through eight who have written permission from their parents. Students who want to do a book report on a Harry Potter book can do so only with written permission. Not surprisingly, Feenstra also declared that the school district would not buy any future Potter books.

Supreme Court Hears Playboy Challenge to Law Banning "Signal Bleed"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was puzzled. On November 30, the Supreme Court was hearing argument over the constitutionality of a law that requires Playboy and other distributors of sexually explicit programming on cable television to improve the scrambling of "indecent" pictures and sounds received by non-subscribers or to broadcast only during hours when children are unlikely to be "assaulted" by occasional glimpses of nudity. As is often the case with censorship legislation, the law was approved by Congress without hearings to establish either the seriousness of the problem or the cost of a technological solution. Playboy has argued that unintentional exposure of children to sexual images rarely occurs and is not harmful when it does. (Even the Supreme Court has held that nudity, by itself, is not "harmful to minors.") Because complete scrambling is prohibitively expensive, all distributors now broadcast between 10 p.m. and six a.m.

But Ginsburg was less interested in the practical questions than the principle involved. A lower court declared the law unconstitutional when it was shown that parents could easily obtain blocking devices from their cable companies. Why was Congress insisting on making this decision for parents, she asked. Didn't this amount to an assertion that government had the right to act as "kind of a super parent?"

This is also the question that ABFFE, the Association of American Publishers and other members of Media Coalition asked in the amicus brief that we filed in the Supreme Court. But observers believe that the Court is likely to uphold the law.

Michigan Legislators Mulls Sweeping Definition of "Adult" Bookstores

Members of the Michigan legislature are planning to introduce a bill to regulate "adult" bookstores, theaters and related businesses. Unfortunately, the bill defines an adult bookstore as a business that uses as little as 10 per cent of its floor space for the display of works that contain nudity. As a result, a bookstore that includes a large display of photography books or magazines might be forced to comply with the zoning and other restrictions that are currently applied only to stores that deal exclusively in sexually explicit material. ABFFE is working with members of Media Coalition to change the proposed law.

ABFFE Adds Greg Gibson's "Gone Boy" to Violence Reading List

ABFFE has added a new title to its Selected Reading List on Violence and Youth. Gregory Gibson’s "Gone Boy: A Walkabout" is the story of Gibson’s investigation of the murder of his son, Galen, at Simon’s Rock College in 1992, (Kodansha International, ISBN 1-56836-292-7, $24). Galen was one of several people shot by a student who fired randomly with a cheap rifle that he has smuggled onto the campus. Gibson wanted to know why the student had committed his crimes; how he got his gun, and why college administrators failed to avert the disaster. The book is a moving depiction of how Gibson conquered the rage that nearly destroyed him. His investigation reveals that the causes of even a single act of violence are complex and often shrouded in ambiguity.

ABFFE Picks for December

Book: Jay A. Gertzman's "Bookleggers and Smuthounds; the Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940," (University of Pennsylvania Press, hardcover, ISBN 0-8122-3493-6) is a fascinating study of the role that distributors of erotica played in paving the way for the legalization of "Ulysses," "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and other novels that depict sex candidly. The role of booksellers also receives extensive coverage. For a full description, look at ABFFE President Chris Finan's review in the December issue of Books-on-Law, www.jurist.law.pitt.edu/lawbooks/index.htm.

Movie: Michael Mann's "The Insider" is the best movie about the press since "All the President's Men." Unfortunately, it doesn't have a happy ending. It tells the story of Dr. Jeffrey Wigand's ill-fated effort to expose the wrongdoing of the tobacco industry on the CBS' "60 Minutes." It is a strong, cautionary tale about the power of corporations to suppress speech.

Previously in ABFFE Update