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Show john harrington You are sitting in your home. The door is locked. It is 8 p.m. The television is on. A beer is on the coffee table, you are munching a sandwich. It has been a long day at the office. The kids are upstairs doing homework, your spouse is on the way in to join you. The evening movie on your expensive cable channel (that you waited two years to have hooked up) is "Kramer vs. Kramer." The intro music plays, you settle in: although you wanted to, you never had a chance to go to a theatre to see this film. You are relaxed, content. "Wham!" goes the front door, as it splinters into fragments. Loud voices are next, bright lights. There is gunfire. Husband and wife, both 36 years old, taste plaster as they are slammed face-first into the den wall. The bowling trophy falls from the shelf above the television. The screen explodes in a blue-white flame as the trophy catches it on the way by. "You have the right to remain silent," goes the burly cop, who looms behind you with a .38 dangling from his right hand. The charge? You were watching smut on your cable channel. You have gone against the will of the Utah Legislature. In the eyes of the law as we know it in Utah, you are a moral deviant. You belong behind bars. The kids rush downstairs. Bruno, your 10-year-old, speaks. "I'm sorry Mommy, Daddy, but I had to turn you in. Our teachers at school told us we had to report our parents if they watched naughty movies on television." Bruno turns to eight-year-old Clarisse, who nods in agreement. Across the room, your tattered high-school copy of George Orwell's 1984 falls from the bookcase to the floor. In the breeze, the faint hint of a voice says "I told you so." Don't sell this scene short, the Utah House and Senate have already started the ball rolling. You have heard of the law the Legislature passed last week, U.S. Constitution be damned? No nasty cable T.V.? Who cares if you have to contact the cable television outlet . and PAY for the service? If you get a movie in the house, or a show, or a monologue or God knows what else, and it visually or verbally depicts things sexual, the people who beam it in are in a "heap o' trouble, boy, you got it?" All this from the Legislature that proudly passed a law that would have required women who sought abortions to view photographs of aborted fetuses before they could have the operation. That law, like the cable law will do (if the covernor doesn't veto it), found its way into court. And, like the abortion picture law, it will most likely get smacked with a fat federal permanent injunction. Then, that precedent being set, every smut channel in the world will become available on Utah cable. That is because Utah will be one state where the courts will have said, "If it is in an individual's home and not being forced on the public, you can't regulate it." Think of the irony, the one state that tried to save itself from home porno, will most likely come to find itself on the leading edge of the industry. ; If the Legislature would stop trying to put everyone's lifestyle face-first into the plaster, these things would not happen. If the United States is the nation of "you choose," Utah has become the state of "we choose for you." And that's ioo bad. |