Colorado 'Harmful to Minors' Bill Approved by Senate Judiciary Committee

On Wednesday, February 13, the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee ignored the pleas of booksellers and voted 4 - 2 to approve a bill that bans the sale to minors of books and magazines that are "harmful to minors." Matthew Miller, general manager of the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver and Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and Lisa Knudsen, executive director of the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, addressed the committee before the vote to express concerns that the bill would have a chilling effect on the sale of material that is protected by the First Amendment for adults and older minors. The legislation was also opposed by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and other members of the Media Coalition, which submitted a memo detailing their objections.

"This is a backward step, but it is only the first of several votes on the bill," ABFFE President Chris Finan said. "ABFFE will work with Colorado booksellers and librarians to explain to the rest of the legislature how 'harmful to minors' laws threaten free speech."

Senate Bill 125, which was introduced by Sen. Ted Harvey (R-Highlands Ranch) and Rep. Amy Stephens (R-Monument), in an attempt to protect children from access to "certain sexually explicit materials," specifically allows municipalities to adopt ordinances concerning sexually explicit materials or performances that are "harmful to minors." Moreover, the law makes it a class 2 misdemeanor to disseminate to a minor any material that is harmful to minors or to allow a minor to view any performance that is harmful to minors.

In his testimony, Miller stated that the law would force booksellers to apply their own personal and often conflicting judgments about what material is harmful to minors. "This legislation would have a chilling effect on the publication and dissemination of books, magazines, and other materials that are protected by the First Amendment for adults and older minors -- works with literary, artistic, political, and scientific value," Miller said. "If this bill is enacted and enforced, every bookseller and librarian would be placed in the untenable position of censor."

"If SB 125 is passed, booksellers will have only two options," Miller continued. "Either get rid of any book that might be 'harmful to minors,' depriving adults and older minors of works that they have a constitutional right to purchase, or undertake to follow every minor who enters the store to ensure that he or she is not perusing something that they shouldn't. Since the Tattered Cover would never censor adults, the bill virtually forces us to segregate the store, putting potentially 'harmful' works in an 'adults only' section that would stigmatize them as 'dirty' books."

Said Knudsen, "Even if the proposed bill targeted only visual -- not textual -- depictions of what some would consider material harmful to minors, it would be impossible for booksellers to identify those books.... Even the tiniest 'mom and pop' bookstore in Colorado carries several thousand titles at any given time, and a large percentage of their inventory is constantly changing as new books are published. For booksellers to have to sit down with each book and read it to find material that might be deemed harmful to minors represents an impossible burden.... I hope that this Committee will decide to keep the responsibility for raising children where it belongs -- with parents."

Calling the law "potentially unconstitutional," the Media Coalition memo argued that SB 125 would "significantly limit the access by adults and older minors to material that they have a First Amendment right to browse, borrow, or buy. While bookstores and libraries are sensitive to creating an environment appropriate for patrons of all ages, including minors, they feel a strong responsibility to ensure adults' access to the widest range of constitutionally protected material as possible."

"Our other concern," Media Coalition wrote, "is that this bill would apply the harmful to minors language to Internet communication. If so, it would make no distinction between a computer transmission and a book or magazine. But cyberspace is not like a bookstore. There is no way to know whether the person accessing 'harmful' material is a minor or an adult. As a result, the effect of banning the computer dissemination of material 'harmful to minors' is to force a provider, whether a publisher or an online carrier, to either risk prosecution or deny access to both minors and adults and thus depriving adults of their First Amendment rights." --David Grogan