SANDY SPRINGS, GA – At a meeting Tuesday, the Sandy Springs City Council tabled a vote on a proposed obscenity ordinance, delaying the vote until the Council’s July session in order to hold further discussions and refine the ordinance’s language.“There was a sense among some of us that we needed to do some more work on this –perfect it,” said councilman Rusty Paul, who made the motion to table the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is a murky area of law and you have to be careful how you draft it to make sure it complies with what the court said.”
The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Georgia’s obscenity law unconstitutionally limits the free-speech rights of businesses to advertise and that the state legislature didn’t craft new legislation to replace the invalidated law prior to the close of its last session.
Paul said another question the council is considering is sure whether it should intervene with a local ordinance or wait for the Georgia state legislature to draft a new obscenity law when the state legislative session begins.
The ordinance being considered by the City Council employs a definition of “obscene” that is very similar to that used nationwide, employing the “Miller test” (in reference to the standard set in the benchmark 1972 case Miller v. California) to determine whether material is obscene.
According to reports in the Journal-Constitution, the ordinance would make it unlawful to sell, lend, rent, lease, give, or advertise material that satisfies the definition of “obscene,” but “protects anyone needing the material for a sexuality class or as prescribed by a doctor.”
The prohibition of advertising “obscene” material potentially runs afoul of the 11th Circuit’s decision, however, and the ban on advertising was what the Court found unconstitutional in the February decision.
Atlanta-based attorney Alan I. Begner, who represents several adult businesses in Sandy Springs, who last week told YNOT that the Sandy Springs ordinance could provide local prosecutors with a way to “go after stores that it couldn’t otherwise go after for distributing ‘obscene’ material,” isn’t sure what to make of the city council tabling the obscenity ordinance vote.
“Tabling it doesn’t mean they’re not going to pass it,” Begner told the Journal-Constitution Tuesday night.
