The 50-year-old former prosecutor relishes being one of the drafters of the Communications Decency Act, a spokesman for more anti-porn laws and a sworn enemy of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're still doing it. We're going to keep going with COPA and CIPA," said Taylor, who is the president of the National Law Center for Children and Families in Fairfax, Virginia.
"Every year we'll put a bill in there, every other year, just to keep the ACLU in business." COPA is the Child Online Protection Act, which was successfully challenged by the ACLU, and CIPA is the Children's Internet Protection Act, which the ACLU has vowed to challenge next month. "They should send me Christmas presents instead of hate mail. I'm putting their rotten little kids through private school," Taylor says about ACLU litigators in the group's New York headquarters.
Taylor says that unlike previous years, he won't be asking Congress for more criminal laws: He's happy enough with what's already on the books and believes that since the Justice Department is now headed by Republicans, it'll do a better job defending the laws in court. "If we get grownups in the Justice Department and the White House, maybe they'll follow the law," says Taylor -- who, like other anti-pornsters, has complained that the Clinton administration was not sufficiently serious about defending the Communications Decency Act and its progeny in court.
But if the Supreme Court rules against him on a law outlawing images that "appear" to be of nude children -- two appeals courts upheld it and one did not -- Taylor says Congress might have to step in. "If the Supreme Court says we can't have the morphed child porn law, we'll have to come up with a new plan for that," he says. Barry Steinhardt, the associate director of the ACLU and frequent Taylor foe, says: "The Congress can keep setting up (new laws), but we'll keep knocking them down. It's not Bruce Taylor, but Congress that hasn't gotten the message yet that speech on the Internet is entitled to the highest protection."
And Taylor's quip about private schools? Replies Steinhardt: "None of the ACLU staff people working on this issue have any children in private school. My kids have all gone to public schools."
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