T’S CENSORSHIP FOR PAY-TV FARE TO BE SCREENED by Charles Whited

T’S CENSORSHIP FOR PAY-TV FARE TO BE SCREENED
Miami Herald, The (FL) - June 27, 1982
Author: CHARLES WHITED Herald Columnist

The censors are at it again.

This fall, Miami voters will have the opportunity go to the polls to decide what, if anything, individual pay-television viewers cannot watch in the privacy of their own homes.

Mayor Maurice Ferre doesn’t want "obscene" or "indecent" material from cable television corrupting the morals of his grandchildren, or anybody else for that matter.

The city’s resolution would make it unlawful for any cable system to broadcast any "lewd, lascivious, filthy, offensive or indecent" material as defined by Florida statutes.

This business all started, you’ll recall, when Mayor Ferre, while on a trip to New York, accidentally tuned in a skin flick in his hotel room. Ferre, who must have led a sheltered life, was shocked.

As the commission voted last week to put the question to a referendum in September, Ferre tried to back off from being labeled an outright prude, saying community standards are for voters to decide. The thing is fraught with irony. Censors have been trying to put the lid on sex since Adam and Eve, without success. And in this era of proliferating hard-core entertainment, the city’s efforts seem rather pallid.

In Miami, or anyplace else in South Florida, one doesn’t have to wait for cable to buy "adult" television fare. On-TV, the noncable service, sells it for $4.95 extra per month.

I called On-TV and asked a salesperson: "Can I buy that right now in the city of Miami?"

"Certainly, sir," she replied.

Adult pay-TV programming is a matter of choice, anyhow. One pays extra for cable service. The audience has the option of tuning out what it finds objectionable. And if all else fails, there is the on-off switch.

As for deciding what children should and shouldn’t see, it seems to me that that’s the parents’ job, not the government’s.

What really troubles me about all this is not the question of smut but the larger question of censorship. Where does thought control end? And what gives Maurice Ferre -- or a majority of the voters in Miami -- the right to decide what private citizens can or cannot see, hear, read or think in the privacy of their own homes? W ith the advent of today’s rabid moralists, thought control doesn’t stop with X- rated TV. Some of them are out to purge "hidden drug messages" in rock music. Others would cleanse our library shelves of certain books, including Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five and Soul on Ice. (One recent argument against Slaughterhouse Five was that it’s "un-American.") These censors, too, justify their bans in the name of decency and righteousness.

Any Miamian with a yen for porn doesn’t have to wait for the soft-core offerings of cable TV. You can buy a home video- cassette player and order by mail the hardest-core stuff on the market -- Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door. They’re advertised in all the video magazines, which are available at most newsstands. And for lower-priced fare, Dade and Broward counties abound with XXX-rated movie theaters that show hard-core flicks. They’re advertised in the newspapers, including The Miami Herald.

There may be questions of legality concerning Miami’s proposed censorship. Mormon-dominated Utah passed a law banning pay-TV broadcasting of "any pornographic or indecent material." Six months ago a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional. He reasoned: People offended by what’s on the tube don’t have to watch it.

But the real clincher, to me, is this: Last year, I visited the Soviet Union to see for myself the most thought-controlled society on earth. At the Moscow airport, a tough customs officer found two magazines in my luggage, Time and Computer World. She
thumbed each, page by page, before passing me through. What was she looking for?

"Nude or suggestive pictures," a Soviet citizen told me later. "They are not allowed in the Soviet Union."