by Andrew O’Hehir

About the author: Andrew O’Hehir is a senior editor for Spin, a monthly music magazine.

By the time you read this, the Supreme Court may already have thrown out the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the monumentally ill-advised cybercensorship law supposedly designed to keep kids from encountering porn on the Internet. [The Supreme Court struck down the CDA in June 1997.] While this particular bad legislation is probably toast, there’s a larger lesson not to forget here: People who are frightened by the rapid pace of cultural change will always seek to impose external controls on it, and there will always be callous politicians ready to pander to those frightened people with all kinds of lame, half-baked ideas.

What is worse, some of those politicians—like our endlessly hypocritical President&mdash...