The Battle of Memphis : It’s parent against parent in the debate over a city law that sets strict limits on what kids are allowed to see at pop concerts

Marilyn Loeffel is a trim, friendly, talkative woman in her late 30s who takes her role as a parent seriously. She’s careful about the food her two children eat, the clothes they wear--and the music they hear.

“Parenting in the ‘90s is not just about wiping noses, learning how to sew sweet little dresses and baking homemade bread,” declared the 37-year-old Memphis mother of girls aged 2 and 15.

To Loeffel, parenting in the ‘90s is also about lobbying for laws that protect youngsters from bad influences.

As president of FLARE, a 300-family, self-described “moral concerns” group in Memphis, she spends about 50 hours a week delivering speeches, organizing letter campaigns and coordinating boycotts.

FLARE--an acronym that stands for Family Life America Responsible Education Under God Inc.--was instrumental last May in helping to rewrite the Tennessee state obscenity code and in passing a Memphis ordinance last summer that prohibits dancers at topless bars from getting any closer than 12 inches to customers.

But when Loeffel’s group zeroed in on pop music concerts, it wasn’t just people in Memphis who noticed.

Last April, the Memphis City Council passed what is believed to be the most stringent concert content ordinance in the country--a law that FLARE had long demanded. Under the ordinance, any performer, promoter or venue owner who knowingly exposes a minor to “harmful material” during a concert in Memphis may be arrested.

Loeffel celebrated, but her joy wasn’t shared by every parent.

Larry McDaniel, an affable, bearded truck driver who lives in the Memphis suburb of Bartlett, also considers himself a responsible parent. But he never paid much attention to FLARE until the “harmful content” concert law was passed.

Now, he finds himself embroiled in a legal action against the ordinance that Loeffel, whom he still has never met, and FLARE initiated--an action that is the focal point in a national debate.

Like Loeffel, McDaniel, 43, is concerned about the kind of entertainment that his four children, aged 10 to 14, see or hear.

McDaniel--who doesn’t drink, smoke or take drugs and has been married to his second wife for 14 years--often goes to concerts with them. A hard-rock fan who likes such bands as Aerosmith and KISS, McDaniel even previews cassettes that the kids bring to the house.

But rather than helping him, McDaniel feels the ordinance interferes with his rights as a parent. He specifically objects to a provision that prohibits parents and guardians of underage children from allowing minors to attend “harmful” concerts. Violators face fines of $50 per infraction.

About the FLARE campaign and the ordinance, he said: “These people are not going to tell my children what to do. They don’t send them to school, they don’t buy their clothes, they don’t feed them, they don’t help them with their homework. So what right have they to tell my child what they can or cannot do? That’s my job and nobody else’s.”

Though he had never been involved in any type of political or legal action previously, McDaniel felt so strongly about the concert law that he contacted the American Civil Liberties Union. A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the ordinance based on the First and 14th amendments was filed on May 10 in his behalf by the ACLU in the Western U.S. District Court of Tennessee. Summary judgment motions were filed on Aug. 3, and U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner is expected to rule on the matter this month.

Memphis City Ordinance No. 3957 combines language from the 1973 Miller U.S. Supreme Court decision with text lifted from a “harmful to minor” amendment added last spring to the Tennessee obscenity statute.

Under the ordinance, concerts considered “harmful to minors” are defined as performances that include “any description or representation, in whatever form, of nudity, sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence or sadomasochistic abuse.”

A performance would be in violation of the law if it “predominantly appeals to the prurient, shameful or morbid interest of minors, is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors, and is utterly without redeeming social importance for minors.”

Jimmy Moore, the 56-year-old Memphis city councilman who sponsored the measure, defended his ordinance.

“We aren’t attempting to legislate morality with this law,” Moore said. “But enough is enough. Somebody has to stop this garbage from being performed in public.”

Larry Crain, an attorney for the Rutherford Institute, a Christian civil rights legal defense organization, said the Memphis concert ordinance could serve as “a model for the nation.”

The head of the North American Concert Promoters Assn. calls the ordinance a dangerous precedent.

“This ordinance is about repression,” association president Carl Freed said. “What we have here is Big Brother talking.”

The Memphis City Police Department has been given the responsibility of enforcing the law. Officers meet with promoters and performers prior to shows to explain the boundaries of the city’s obscenity codes. Plus, each concert is patrolled by a minimum of two officers.

So far, no one has been arrested, even though such controversial acts as hard-rockers Aerosmith and KISS as well as rap stars Public Enemy have played Memphis since the bill’s April 17 passage.

Still, Cmdr. Mike Dodd, head of the Memphis vice squad, believes it is only a matter of time before the ordinance is tested.

“At some point, somebody is bound to step over the line,” Dodd said in a phone interview. “Maybe it will be a performer, maybe it will be a parent, but somewhere down the road, someone will go to jail.”

The idea for the “harmful material” concert ordinance was conceived 10 years ago by Loeffel’s group. Founded in 1980 to “fight moral pollution and protect the family,” FLARE is affiliated with several influential political and religious leaders in Memphis.

Pastor Adrian Rogers, one of the most prominent Southern Baptist leaders in the country, sits on FLARE’S advisory board. Notable political figures such as Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, former Atty. Gen. Ed Meese and Bob DeMoss, youth specialist for the Pomona-based Focus on the Family, are often featured as speakers at the organization’s yearly Christian fair.

“I’m sorry, but when it comes to restricting the spread of pornography, I am my brother’s keeper,” Loeffel said. “What we do is a very thankless job. It’s like cleaning toilets. I cannot understand how people have allowed things to get this bad, especially Christians.

“The way I look at is if a neighbor down the street is performing some kind of child abuse and I am made aware of it--whether it be mental, physical, sexual or whatever--the state expects me to report that parent, doesn’t it? Well what about the moral abuse of a child?”

One reason the Memphis ordinance is being viewed with urgency by music industry observers is that several arrests for concert obscenity have taken place this year around the country.

Law enforcement agencies in various U.S. cities are reinterpreting obscenity provisions in existing penal codes to arrest entertainers who perform “explicit” material.

In Hollywood, Fla., several members of the Miami rap group 2 Live Crew and a rock group called Too Much Joy were arrested last summer on separate occasions for performing “obscene” material at adult clubs. 2 Live Crew’s case goes to trial Tuesday in Ft. Lauderdale.

Over the last 12 months, several prominent pop-rock artists have been arrested in separate Georgia incidents for “suggestive” performances--including Bobby Brown, LL Cool J, Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee, KISS leader Gene Simmons and Kid N’ Play. All simply paid nominal fines, about $500 per infraction.

Most recently, David Murray Brockie, the lead singer of the theatrical heavy-metal band GWAR (which plays the Hollywood Palladium on Friday), was arrested after a Sept. 18 concert at the 4808 Club in Charlotte, N.C., on a felony charge of “disseminating obscenities.”

But no statute in the nation so specifically targets controversial concert performances as the new Memphis law.

Although FLARE campaigned 10 years for a concert content law, it wasn’t until last February, when Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee mooned the audience during a concert at Memphis’ Mid-South Coliseum, that momentum for the ordinance began to build.

Loeffel said her organization received help from such leading media watchdog organizations as the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s Tupelo-based American Family Assn., the Nashville branch of Focus on the Family and the Rutherford Institute to help push the measure forward.

The Virginia-based Rutherford Institute helped design the American Family Assn.’s legal attack against the film “The Last Temptation of Christ” and has also provided legal defense in numerous anti-abortion cases.

To dramatize the issue, FLARE targeted a Memphis appearance last April of notorious Miami rappers 2 Live Crew, whose “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” album was later declared obscene by a federal judge in Ft. Lauderdale.

Before the concert, FLARE members distributed copies of lyrics from the “Nasty” album to parents at area schoolyards and shopping malls.

Afterwards, City Council chairman Jimmy Moore--who had been working on the proposal since 1988--engaged city attorney Brady Bratusch to help draft an ordinance with “some teeth in it.”

FLARE suggested that the city attorney’s office contact Larry Crain of the Rutherford Institute to help draft a constitutionally correct proposal. The concert ordinance passed the City Council by a margin of 10 to 3.

“All we wanted was something that would force parents to go and see for themselves how bad things have gotten so that they would be able to make a more educated decision on what their children are being exposed to,” Loeffel said.

“We never thought that after 10 years of not getting anything done, that they would pass a law that would go this far. But we’re glad they did. It’s better than anything we ever imagined.”

Promoters are not alone in opposing the Memphis ordinance.

On May 4, Robert Eugene Crain, director of the Germantown Community Theatre and no relation to attorney Larry Crain, filed a lawsuit against the city of Memphis in the Western U.S. District Court of Tennessee charging that the “live performance” ordinance deprived parents of their right to determine what performances their children may attend.

Six days later, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of McDaniel. U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner consolidated the two suits on May 16. The suit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and compensatory damages suffered for deprivation of constitutional rights plus court costs.

Meanwhile, the two parents who are principal figures in this case remain adamant about their positions.

“We are not just Puritans who have never been affected,” Loeffel said. “Not just some pack of holier-than-thou, self-righteous people living in little ivory towers. We got involved in this because members of our families have been hurt and we don’t want to see it happen to somebody else.”

Still, McDaniel, who said he filed the suit because he feared he might face arrest for taking his daughter to a recent Aerosmith concert, maintains the ordinance is unconstitutional.

“In my opinion, as long as I live in America, it should be my choice as to which cotton-picking concerts my children should be able to attend,” McDaniel said. “If I don’t deem it harmful to them, by George then they ought to have the right to go.”