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	This editorial appears in The American Reporter today.  The AR is
on the World Wide Web at http://www.newshare.com/Reporter/today.html.

                   WE VOW TO CHALLENGE THE EXON ACT
                              by Joe Shea
                   American Reporter Editor-in-Chief

        The 84-16 vote that gave passage yesterday to the unwise and
clearly unconstitutional Exon Amendment, better known as the
Communications Decency Act, was a moment of infamy in the history of the
United States Senate.
        The Act provides for a punishment of two years in jail and a
$100,000 fine for anyone who uses the Internet to publish "any obscene
communication in any form including any comment . . . or image."
        As telephone companies won concessions that will allow foreign
companies to buy them, let a single company own newspapers, radio,
television and cable operations in the same market, and let cable
companies raise their rates to whatever heights they want, the Senate took
away the gleaming promise of the Internet and replaced it with a glowering
suspicion of tens of millions of computer-literate Americans.
        This foolish law must be resisted without quarter.
        The American Reporter has not published even one four-letter word
in its first three months, and has intended never to do so.  It is
contrary to our deeply-held religious beliefs to publish obscene and
indecent work, and to do so would be inappropriate for a newspaper devoted
to news of general interest for a wide variety of readers.
        But we value our freedom far more than we value our newspaper. We
will not publish a newspaper that is not free to declare whatever it
pleases to whomever cares to read it; to do so would be to break faith
with everything that newspapers stand for in these United States.
        Therefore, we hereby declare that if the Act is passed and signed
into law with the current provisions in it, we will publish material of
the sort that we ourselves detest on that occasion, and only on the
subject of the 86 United States Senators who have perpetrated this crime
against the Bill of Rights.  To that end, at this time we cordially invite
submissions, sufficiently graphic to offend the obscenity statute.
        We will send the offending article to our e-mail subscribers, post
it to our Web site, and present the offending material to the FCC, and any
other regulatory or law enforcement body designated under the Act, and
invite prosecution.
        And we will fight the law until the United States Supreme Court
has ruled upon it and declared it the enemy of freedom.

                                   -30-



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