angents

news & views

CENSORSHIP CONTINUES MOOT ISSUE

From California and elsewhere has come a spate of clippings on censorship. Films, books, morals, and mail are all involved. Locally,

the L.A. TIMES and other sources have reported that L.A. County Supervisor Warren Dorn is backing a proposal for an amendment to the State Constitution which would permit local option at all levels as relates to ordinances controlling obscenity, prostitution, pornography and venereal disease. State laws, which are now the sole control in these areas, are considered by many to be inadequate, and it is expected that Dorn's proposals will win wide popular support. ONE takes no sides on political personages or issues, per se, but cannot refrain from some soci-

ological comment on this develop-

ment. At a time when the American Law Institute is developing a Model Penal Code which may eventually bring various State laws into consistency, surely any reversion from State Law to local option represents exactly the opposite tendency. The U.S.A. has come a long way from

26

19th Century provincialism, and the constant impact of our press and other media of communication and travel is rapidly erasing remaining cultural differences. It maining public tastes and the requirements would certainly seem that, by now, of public safety and welfare cannot differ so greatly from community to community that they cannot be adequately met by a single, state-wide body of statutes. If present laws, at State level, are insufficient to curb abuses, or if their enforcement is lax, it appears more consistent with modern trends to attack the problem where it presently exists, than to bury the basic social issues under an avalanche of conflicting local legislation.

social

Again according to the L.A. TIMES for 5-25, the 1962 Federal lay of Communist mail from a forlaw permitting inspection and deeign country was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as a violation of the First Amendment. In his opinion, Justice Douglas stated, in part, that the government cannot require "affirmative" action by citizens to get their mail, since "this requirement is almost certain to