Sex channels using subliminal come-ons

     To the editor:
      The U.S. Supreme Court last week cleared the way for enforcement of law that protects children from seeing "unscrambled" images on cable sex channels. While I am grateful that the court decided unanimously to protect the innocent, I am deeply troubled still. The innocent are not being protected. The innocent are being bombarded with subliminal images of the most harmful kind.
      I have been a cable subscriber for more than five years. During a recent illness, I was bedridden and used channel-surfing to take my mind off my discomfort. That is, until I became sickened by what I saw.
      It was about 1 p.m. on a weekday as I clicked through all the channels. But as I clicked through the "scrambled" sex channels, the signal unscrambled for about two seconds -- just long enough for the most aberrant, dehumanizing scene I have ever come across, invaded my mind. Later, my husband and I repeated the channel surfing to learn whether it was an accidental unscrambling. It wasn't. The two-second image assault was repeated over and over again. Different scenes, different times, all horrible.
      It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to know what is happening here. In my opinion, the sex channel owners have discovered a subliminal way to advertise their debasing imagery to unsuspecting viewers. We had not been informed by the cable company that the sex channels could be blocked completely. But once we voiced our outrage, they could not get to our house fast enough to make the change. The point is, for more than five years we have been brutalized, unknowingly, by these images.
      Had I not been paying attention to what I was doing, the images could have blipped into my mind with no awareness at all. But later, they would have surfaced. And if I was prone to wanting this kind of "entertainment," I would already have been set up, knowing exactly where to go to get it. It was as if I had been given a sufficient first-dose of an addictive, toxic drug without knowing it.
      How many innocent children have surfed through the sex channels and been violated by this kind of imagery? How many teen-agers? How many adults have had these images forced into their minds without their perception -- or their permission?
      It is unconscionable what some sex channel owners are doing to sell their products. Though they have the right to do anything they want to do for themselves, they do not have the right to force their images on the innocent or the unsuspecting. Nor do they have the right to manipulate human weakness in such a deceptive way.
     KAROL ANN BARNETT
     Las Vegas