Bill to Ban News Vending of Porn Buried

Worried about possible infringement on First Amendment guarantees of free speech, a state Senate committee on Tuesday moved to bury a bill that would ban the sale of sexually explicit tabloids from sidewalk news racks.

The intent of the measure, sponsored by Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), was to keep pornography out of the hands of minors. Backed by the county of Los Angeles and the state PTA, Ferguson’s bill called for curtailing the sale of the sex newspapers from coin-operated racks.

Ferguson’s measure gained surprising support from some civil libertarians in the Assembly, which passed it in January, and seemed to be gaining behind-the-scenes momentum on the Senate side before Tuesday’s hearing.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 5 to 4 to stop the Ferguson bill in its tracks and instead hold onto it for interim study--a move that many acknowledged was the death knell for the controversial measure this year.

In voting to hold the bill over for study, Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) cited possible legal problems with the bill’s restrictions against the vending machine sales of any publication showing seven specific sexual acts. Such restrictions could be held to violate the First Amendment, he said.

“I’m sympathetic to families trying to inculcate values that they believe in their children,” Lockyer said. “I’m not sure that state intervention in people’s lives is the way to accomplish that.”

Ferguson, however, said his measure was aimed only at relocating the sale of the explicit tabloids, not regulating their contents.

“It might be more obvious to them if there’s a loophole in the law that allowed liquor, whiskey, to be sold from a vending machine from which they (minors) had access,” Ferguson said. “They would quickly see that that’s a loophole, and they would do away with it.”