Some are fanatical, and some are ambitious, and there is a prosecutor somewhere who will prosecute you for anything that he thinks the law will allow. One of the Senators commented the day the CDA passed that portions of Catcher in the Rye , posted on the Net, should be considered indecent. The conference committee considered, and rejected, an exemption proposed by Congressman Rick White for material with scientific, literary, artistic or political value. The panel didn't buy it. But the bottom line is that the First Amendment should not be interpreted to require us to entrust the protection it affords to the judgment of prosecutors.
Prosecutors come and go.
Even federal judges are limited to life tenure. The First Amendment remains to give protection to future generations as well. Because there was no such reference, many commentators, including me, simply assumed that the CDA was meant to apply local standards, as with obscenity laws. Some well-respected people took a public position that the CDA clearly referred to a national standard. While this might have been a good fallback position for us in the event that the CDA was held constitutional, I had serious doubt whether it was what the CDA proponents really intended.