POP/ROCK - March 25, 1993

Is Censorship Back?: State-run Czech television has banished the country’s most popular rock video to late-night viewing, saying its reference to homosexuality “massacres the morals of our youth (and) endangers the mental and moral development of the young.” Lucie Bila’s “Laska je Laska” (“Love Is Love”), containing the lyrics “Love is love when boys go out with girls, boys with boys and girls with girls,” won the 1992 Czech equivalent of the Grammy for best video. It shows a succession of unlikely lovers, including a policeman and jogger, and Santa Claus and the Devil, cavorting on Prague’s traditional lovers’ lanes. The restriction, which songwriter Gabriela Osvaldova said smacked of the censorship that was routine in the country’s four decades of Communist rule, is the first such move since the 1989 “velvet revolution.”