Re: Local Obscenity Regulations

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@io.com>]

On Sat, 31 Aug 1996, Sean Sutherland wrote:

> Seems that Oregon has a ballot up for measure which will allow each city 
> and county to decide for itself what obscenity is.

Initiatives like this keep popping up in Oregon (we had another anti-free
speech initiative in '94) because Oregon's state constitution has been 
interpreted to protect speech more broadly than the US constitution. 
It seems like a robust set of constitutional rights makes some people
nervous, and they respond by asking that those rights be curtailed. (cf
the initiative which limited California's constitutional search & seizure
protections to the federal standard. feh. Oregon will probably face such
an initiative soon, because Oregon's constitutional search & seizure
provisions are significantly more protective than the federal standard.) 

But the good (?) news is that the US constitution acts as a "floor" for
rights; the gentle citizens of Oregon can't restrict their own free speech
rights below the federal standard, no matter how frustrating that is to
Ayatollah Mannix and his ilk. (The notion of "community standards" is
already part of federal free speech jurisprudence; but "community" is not
necessarily coterminous with city or county boundaries.) 

But all of my books are in boxes and I'll be a California resident again 
in ~24 hours. Goodbye, Oregon lunacy. Hello, California lunacy. :)