ACLU Lawyer Compares Blocking Pornography to Ripping Apart Encyclopedia
I can’t tell you the number of times I have seen stories about people misusing libraries as their own personal adult theater.
It’s especially sickening since most of the people caught aren’t just looking at porn, but more often than not child pornography, which of course is illegal. Given that libraries are public places where children are often present, it is truly hard to imagine anyone having a problem with blocking adult content from public computers.
But then I guess that’s why we have the ACLU.
The Washington State Supreme Court is currently hearing a case regarding whether libraries have the right to refuse to disable their Internet filters when patrons actually request that they do so. ACLU attorney Duncan Manville apparently managed the following quote with a straight face:
“What the library does when it filters out selective pages from the Internet is the equivalent of acquiring the Encyclopedia Britannica and then ripping pages out of it.”
Nowhere in the article did it mention peels of laughter echoing through the courtroom, but I have to chalk that up to poor court reporting. Especially after the assertion was made that a library refusing to become a porn theater is somehow unconstitutional.
Just to make sure I checked the Bill of Rights, and sure enough, nowhere in there did it mention a public right to the Internet, much less unfiltered Internet.
The ACLU is of course trying to paint this as a freedom of information issue, but the article clearly states that librarians can unblock a particular site if its content is not inappropriate and the site was blocked by mistake. Which pokes quite a few holes in Manville’s argument that people are being prevented from accessing legitimate sites. And, as the judge points out, just because speech is protected, doesn’t mean it has to be provided in a library.
The fact that the ACLU is trying to paint someone disturbed enough to want to look at porn in a public library as having their rights trampled by not being able to do so is not surprising. The fact that there are some public libraries that don’t have Internet filtering capabilities is. Call your local library and make sure that if they offer Internet access, they have a filter in place.
Filed under: Internet Safety News
[...] Holditch at Internet Safety.com talks about an “ACLU Lawyer Compares Blocking Pornography to Ripping Apart Encyclopedia” I can’t tell you the number of times I have seen stories about people misusing libraries as [...]
I’m very disappointed that a commercial venture such as Internet Safety.com, which provides a product that I rely on for the welfar my children, feels the need to go politico and rip into the ACLU with such animosity and sarcasm. I could argue the merits of the work of the ACLU, but that’s not the point here. I think you as a company are better off not aligning yourself either with the right or the left, and that includes leaving off the attacks against the ACLU.
You say you “can’t tell you the number of times I have seen stories about people misusing libraries as their own personal adult theater.”
That’s where your credibility ends.
Why don’t you provide an actual number of actual incidents of people actually caught looking at X-rated material in the children’s section of a public library?
Citing story after vague story about a handful of incidents in a nation of 300 million people isn’t very persuasive. Actually, it’s propaganda.