CHARLOTTE -- Reaction to Janet Jackson's breast popped up all around the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention this week, with calls for stricter indecency enforcement, stiffer fines and even toughening federal regulation over cable channels.

The broadcasters association, a Christian group that represents 1,700 organizations, may suggest legislation to Congress or petition the Federal Communications Commission for a new rule that would require cable systems to let customers block offending channels at no cost to themselves, said Ashton Hardy, a lawyer who represents the association and a member of its board of directors.

Currently, cable channels are not required to follow the same decency standards set up for over-the-air broadcasters, because customers have to opt to bring cable into their homes. If customers want to block a channel, Hardy said, the cable company typically requires them to pay for the filter.

By empowering viewers to reject offensive programming, he said, certain channels might hemorrhage viewers and the cable networks might replace them with more suitable programming. U.S. Rep. Richard Burr, a Republican from Winston-Salem, later backed the same proposal in a separate session on public policy and the state of religious broadcasting.

Some convention-goers simply wanted to see more activity by the FCC, particularly in the cable arena. Most television viewers receive the broadcast networks through cable or satellite systems anyway, said Richard Dean, the president of independent television station WFMZ in Allentown, Pa., so it's hypocritical to apply standards to one and not the other. "The FCC is acting as if they were impotent," he said. "We're feeding poison to our children."

The convention included a special session on federal indecency regulation that was supposed to focus on the FCC's recent decision that the use of a certain four-letter word during the 2003 Golden Globes broadcast was not indecent. FCC staffers reasoned that singer Bono used the word as an exclamatory adjective, not as a sexual reference.

But even fresher was the outrage surrounding Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl earlier this month.

"I'd like to believe it was a wake-up call," said Laura Lowery, of the Malverne, N.Y., Love Oasis Christian Church, a nondenominational church that broadcasts religious programming in the New York City area.

The Super Bowl incident may have lent momentum to the movement to restore stricter enforcement of indecency standards. The FCC's approach has veered from the strict suppression of specific words to a more liberal approach that looks at the context of the questionable language or action, according to Rosemary Harold, a lawyer with Wiley, Rein & Fielding, the association's Washington counsel.

Within a few months, the FCC has gone from accepting foul language at the Golden Globes to an immediate call for hearings into the Super Bowl incident. In the interim, legislators have submitted bills that would provide automatic punishment for broadcasting certain words and increasing fines tenfold, up to $275,000 per violation. The FCC also has fined two broadcasters for indecency violations, and an overturning of the Golden Globes decision is imminent, NRB lawyers say.

In the session on public policy and the state of religious broadcasting, U.S. Rep. Mike McIntyre, a Democrat from Lumberton, told conventioneers that cable companies have to have their contracts approved by municipal governments. "Ask them why they are signing contracts with purveyors of pornography."