OpinionJuly 21, 2000

We are hearing all the legal reasons why the Idaho Legislature is out of line in trying to censor what is shown on public television. But a plain old common sense question looms larger than all the legal worries:

Who gave those yahoos in the Legislature the right to go through the television schedule with a fine-toothed comb deciding which shows they will let the people of Idaho see?

Talk about a bunch of politicians overstepping their bounds. Now they want to come into our homes and change the channels for us. What next, go through our mail?

The Idaho Legislature -- alone among all the legislatures in the land -- has had the gall to direct the State Board of Education to monitor and regulate which programs are shown on public television stations. Among other topics, the lawmakers have made it plain that includes preventing any more programs that might tend to present homosexuality in a favorable or neutral light.

In other words, the state of Idaho has decided, like some Eastern European police state back in the days of the Cold War, to ban the broadcast of certain national television programs within the boundaries of Idaho.

Of course, most of the people of Idaho have the good fortune to live on the border of their state -- within broadcasting range of the free states all around. They can still watch the censored programs, if the Legislature succeeds in banning them. They can still bring in the signal from Television Free Utah and Television Free Washington.

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Some lawyers think what Idaho is doing is so unprecedented it is undoubtedly unconstitutional. For instance, First Amendment legal specialist Robert D. Richards, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, observes, "If state legislatures across the country could program their public television stations, they would probably be doing it and doing it in droves."

With all due respect, that isn't necessarily so. Most state legislatures probably shrink from the paternalistic extreme of dictating television watching habits primarily out of fear of voter retaliation.

And it is possible that what the Idaho Legislature is doing is legally feasible and hasn't been tried elsewhere simply because this state's Legislature is the only such body in the nation with so much brass.

Even people who agree to some extent with the lawmakers' objections to the programming in question may find it troubling that the job of choosing channels in our homes would fall to the members of the state Legislature or to anyone else in government.

If the people of Idaho ever feel the need for moral guidance in what they watch on television, it is not the government they will turn to. They will turn to their own parents, their own preachers, their older brothers, their devoted sisters, their wise friends, not to mention their grandpas and their grandmas.

The last place they will go will be into a den of politicians who can't even tell the moral difference between personal convictions and campaign contributions, let alone what is suitable for an adult to watch in the United States of America. -- B.H.

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