Debate Over Free Speech Stops Katz’s Anti-Hate Bill : Legislation: Proposal targeting racist literature is criticized as being too broadly worded, prompting the assemblyman to withdraw it.

The recruiters were remarkably brazen, tucking racist flyers into school lockers, tossing them about library grounds--even littering toy store parking lots with the graphic hate literature.

“When you’ve had enough . . . ,” call this number, the flyers implored beneath a litany of insults aimed at Jews and Latinos. A recording urged callers to join a white supremacist group.

That hatemongers were targeting children in the San Fernando Valley by distributing flyers where they likely would find them was alarming to parents, educators and others.

Among those stepping forward in response was Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who authored legislation to halt the disturbing trend, unaware that, in so doing, he would spark a broader debate over free speech.

What resulted was an ideological scuffle between the lawmaker and defenders of the First Amendment, with Katz eventually withdrawing his bill. The legislation had been scheduled for a committee vote Tuesday.

Katz’s bill would have made it a crime to distribute to children any work that “advocates violence against any person or group because of their race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender or sexual orientation.” Violators would be subject to penalties of up to one year in jail and a $10,000 fine.

It sounded like a noble, and simple enough, idea.

But because its language was so broad, booksellers and others found themselves wondering if they too could be targeted for selling classics to youths.

“Our concern was that the definition was so broad that even literary works would have been drawn into the net,” said Chris Finan, executive director of Media Coalition Inc., a New York advocacy firm that represents the publishing world.

Had the bill become law, Finan said, book distributors might have been prosecuted for selling to minors such timeless works as William Styron’s “Confessions of Nat Turner,” a story about a slave rebellion, or John Steinbeck’s epic “Grapes of Wrath,” in which native Californians viciously attack “Okies.”

The bill had even sparked concern from the librarians’ lobby, who sought and received a special exemption from the measure.

“While the sponsor was aiming at a particular problem, the effect of the bill would have been to put a bookseller in danger of being arrested by an overzealous police officer,” said Finan. “You could hardly sell a newspaper. . . . The problems were endless.

On Friday, Katz said he is now looking for other ways to try to halt distribution of hate literature to impressionable youths--possibly by stepping up penalties for trespassing.

Although he attempted to model his bill after a law that keeps pornography out of the hands of children--a law that the courts have upheld--doing so proved tricky.

“We have not been able to craft the bill yet in a way to get to the real scumbags without walking all over the booksellers,” Katz said.

“There have been a lot of questions raised over how you distinguish between hate material and other material.”

Katz said he will go back to the drawing board in an effort to find another way to tackle the problem. “I think it’s important that the issue be raised,” he said. “I still believe we ought to find a way to protect children from this kind of violence and hatred.”

Finan said the bill’s opponents had held a series of meetings with Katz and were relieved when the lawmaker decided to pull the measure from Tuesday’s legislative calendar.

“If one looks at it as a hate-crimes bill, it’s easy to see why you might want to do something about that problem,” Finan said.

“But if you look at it from the free-speech vantage point, it was really quite dangerous to First Amendment freedoms.”