Our view: Viewer’s choice
The woman featured on the cover of the January/February issue of Women & Guns magazine looks like a young mother who might drive a van filled with kids to Chuck E. Cheese’s. There’s nothing cheesy or sleazy about her, and the entire magazine is done in good taste, sort of a Good Housekeeping for women who own guns.
So when the Second Amendment Foundation discovered that its Women & Guns Internet magazine was blocked by filters on computers in the North Central Regional Library District, the foundation became part of a lawsuit against the library district. Three other plaintiffs – all individuals denied access to materials they were researching on library computers – also joined a lawsuit recently filed in the U.S. District Court in Spokane. The American Civil Liberties Union brought the claim forward for the plaintiffs.
The library patrons’ requests that computer filters be disabled so they could access “constitutionally protected speech” were denied, the ACLU claims. This constitutes an “unlawful form of censorship” that prohibits patrons from exploring the “contemporary marketplace of ideas.”
The lawsuit brings into high relief the challenges faced by public libraries. They must protect young patrons from pornographic material while also protecting the rights of adult patrons to look at almost anything they darn well please, unless it’s illegal or obscene.
Since the passage of the 2000 Children’s Internet Protection Act, libraries that receive certain federal funds must block from children visual depictions of sexual activity, but according to the ACLU, “the Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that libraries should disable the filters upon the request of an adult.”
The adult plaintiffs say their requests were denied. The library district’s attorney says it is doing all that the law requires, and in recent months, the district switched to a less restrictive filtering system.
Unfettered access to information is important for every citizen, but especially for those citizens who live in isolated areas where Internet connections can be hard to come by.
Tasteless and useless junk information exists on the Internet, true, but the constitutional right to free speech doesn’t pass judgment on the quality of information, except in the case of pornography. Libraries, their employees and the software filters utilized by library districts should always err on the side of access.
After all, which is more dangerous to a free society: censoring free speech or the occasional dirty photos that patrons might stumble across while doing that research?
Parents should be the primary Internet gatekeepers for their children – both at home and on visits to the library. And those libraries that receive federal funds have a legal obligation to shield young people from obscene Web sites. But for adult library patrons who request it, those filters should be disabled – willingly and without question. Then, it’s up to the viewers to beware.