Bill Clinton: “Let me begin by saying I support what you're doing, and I've tried to bring the White House up to date electronically.…”

“Let me begin by saying I support what you're doing, and I've tried to bring the White House up to date electronically. You know, we have a pretty sophisticated E-mail operation. And now you can take a tour of the White House and all the Federal agencies on the Internet and find out more than you ever wanted to know. So we're trying to be there for you in virtual reality land. I guess you're asking me about the bill that Senator Exon introduced on trying to regulate obscenity through the E-mail system, or through the electronic superhighway. To be perfectly honest with you, I have not read the bill. I am not familiar with its contents, and I don't know what I think. I do believe--about this specific bill. [Laughter] I'll tell you what I think about the issue. I believe that insofar as that Governments have the legal right to regulate obscenity that has not been classified as speech under the First Amendment, and insofar as the American public widely supports, for example, limiting access of children to pornographic magazines, I think it is folly to think that we should sit idly by when a child who is a computer whiz may be exposed to things on that computer which in some ways are more powerful, more raw, and more inappropriate than those things from which we protect them when they walk in a 7-Eleven. So as a matter of principle, I am not opposed to it. I just can't comment on the details of the bill, because I do not know enough about it. And I do not believe in any way shape or form that we should be able to do on E-mail, or through the electronic superhighway, in terms of Government regulation of speech, anything beyond what we could elsewhere. I think the First Amendment has to be uniform in its application. So I'm not calling for a dilution of the First Amendment. But if you just imagine, those of us who have children and who think about this, you just think about what's the difference in going in the 7-Eleven and hooking up to the computer. I think that we have to find some resolution of this. And within the Supreme Court's standards, which are very strict, I am not philosophically opposed to some action. Thank you very much.”