Internet Filters Go Before Supreme Court...Again

Why force them not to accept it?

This isn't about allowing libraries to install filters - it's about forcing them to. Which I'm decidely against.

 

OH NO! Kids will see see a breast! THE HORROR!

Kids get more traumatized when they walk in and their dad is jackhammering their mom. Lets ban sex if you have kids too!!

 

kids get more traumatized when they flip through the tv and see that benny hinn guy punching people in the head in order to heal them with the power of jesus

 

At the small private college I went to, they installed an internet filter program that cuased you're computer to play a very loud message stating "I'm looking at Porn".

I doubt very few people used the library computers for porn, but did know several people that typed in some web addresses wrong and ended up at porn sites on accident and had to deal with the embarrassment.

 

"EVERYBODY's HUGGING"
-Ralph Wiggum

 

I know the solution - don't let the crappy internet into libraries in the first place.

 

There's a difference between bookmarking Penthouse on the library computer, and blocking it -- just as there's a difference between not having a copy of a book and specifically banning it. I think that the USSC follows the '96 lead and declares this unconstitutional.

This I found to be especially interesting:

What Olson has forgotten is that porn is not illegal. Kiddie porn is certainly illegal, and in some places things like bestiality and necrophilia and depictions of rape are likely illegal, but that's not what this law is about.

People don't necessarily have a "right" to get themselves free porn, but they do have a right to view it -- the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld this. And until someone figures out a way to separate the clearly legal smut from the clearly illegal smut, you can't say that it's suddenly all illegal and unfit for everyone's eyes.

If this means that some library computers need to be kept away from the children's section just in case they could view something potentially mind-altering and evil, so be it. But we can't child-proof the entire goddamn country. We need healthier attitudes about sexuality, anyway.

 

Dude, which part of "Republicans just won the election" didn't you understand?

The one thing that is absolutely guaranteed by the Republican ascension to power, is that sexual attitudes will become more unhealthy, not less. The first item on the Religious Wrong's agenda is banning partial-birth abortion. The second item on their agenda is banning all abortion. The third item on their agenda is installing video cameras in every single bedroom in the United States, and executing all participants caught in a sex act.

The fact that this will essentially de-populate the United States over the course of a month is completely beside the point. We were all supposed to die at the millenium anyway, when Christ put in his second appearance.

What's at issue here is government strictures, not pornography. The government is attempting to force censorship upon public libraries. That's clearly Unconstitutional. If they want to issue a statement encouraging the use of filters, that's fine. If they want to leave the decision on whether to install filters up to the individual communities--who would then apply their own standards--THAT's fine. Heck, it's even desirable.

What is illegal and Unconstitutional is forcing libraries to install filters.

 

What an absurd statement. Can you cite where in the US Constitution it says libraries can not be forced to install filters? Do you want me to begin to list the public entities that must meet strict federal guidelines or else lose their funding?

 

Dude, since when is overprotective parenting exclusively about Republicans?

I disagree completely, even though the USSC in its current obsession with states' rights would agree with you. If you believe in equal protection under the law than you cannot give people some freedoms in some places and not other people in other places strictly because of local morality.

 

Just because the federal government puts strings on some pieces of funding does not mean that they have the right to put whatever strings they want on all types of funding. For example, if the government said that Jews could not travel on roads that were built with federal funding, it would not pass Constitutional muster regardless of how nicely it was packaged.

The question is whether or not the precedents to which you refer supercede the First Amendment.

 

They're not. I was making a final statement unrelated to the library issue (though I still believe it to be true). If we had healthier understanding as a society of our own sexualities, we probably would not have as many people who fetishize everything like rape and torture. But that's another thread.

But just to reiterate what I first said: Rape, incest, bestiality, and pedophilia are illegal in most locations. I am not against outlawing sites that depict illegal acts, and I would expect DA's to go after pornographers who break the law as part of their business. But my comment was based on Olson's comment that porn is illegal. Most porn is not illegal. And until there is a way to effectively separate the legal online smut from the illegal online smut, censoring the illegal smut is not IMO a Constitutional solution. (Of course, if the software could do that, we could just track down the illegal smut peddlers and be done with it.)

I can accept this. The issue is 100% of the computers having filtering software, which to me is an institutional regulation of subjective morality.

This is to me a completely overblown argument (your one example notwithstanding). Porn has never hunted me down on the internet, and I know of no one who has had this problem. By the way, with your Sammy Sosa example, the library filtering software would not have worked.

You could make the same case about television. The solution with that sin-inducing medium is, of course, monitor what your kids are doing. No eight-year-old should be left alone with The Hot Network, nor should they be left alone with hotnetwork.com (which I am assuming exists!). Parents should be parents, instead of waiting for the government and technology to be parents for them. (Christ, I sound like a complete libertarian here!)

With regards to online predators, I assume that kids' chat rooms would not be blocked by this software, so it's still a problem even with this law.

In a library, a split between monitored terminals for minors and unmonitored for adults is reasonable and most certainly Constitutional. But we should know going into this that:
-- The screens don't really work well
-- Porn, as the primary money-maker on the internet, is going to find new and creative ways around whatever blocking software the libraries or whoever use
-- There are going to be 14-year-old boys nationwide who are going to figure out ways around whatever is designed, anyway
-- Most importantly, the screens are only as good as the purveyor of taste that designs them. One man's disgusting smut is another man's literature / art. Is porn defined only as naughty pictures for this law? Would nerve.com be banned? Would Mapplethorpe? How about online editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover?

When Potter Stewart gave his famous line about pornography, he should have just stopped with "I can't define it." For Congress to think that it can do so now is not progress.

 

This is the most interesting political dilemna I know of and deserves a thread all to itself.

 

Filthy rich republicans always assume all parents are like them: filthy rich and well educated, had plenty of time playing golf and for their kids' soccer games.

They could never understand-- why most parents are so cruel to work two or three jobs and leave their kids at home watching pornos?

idiots.

 

Ironically, that's where equal protection and obscenity law collide.

Plenty of pornography would be subject to federal restriction based on the standard articulated above, if not almost completely rescued by the most liberal view of literary, artistic or scientific merit found in the U.S. It's a wild and crazy standard .

By the way, I read Olson's quote to mean that some porn was illegal and the rest was harmful, as in, "there's an enormous amount of illegal porn out there and an additional enormous pile of harmful porn out there..." The Solicitor General would have to know Constitutional Law well enough to be aware that the Supreme Court views most pornography as legal (wouldn't he!?).

 

If you are insinuating that I'm a "filthy rich Republican", you need to spend more time around here.

The worst offenders of child neglect are often the suburbanites who are too wrapped up in themselves to realize that their kids are doing things that could kill them. Parental neglect is a bipartisan, multi-racial, multi-ethnic issue.

 

I wouldn't assume that he believes that most porn should be Constitutionally protected.

If your interpretation is correct, then Olson has tipped his morality on the issue by assuming that most if not all legal porn is in some way harmful. He also needs to admit that the question of what is "harmful" without being illegal is very, very subjective, and depends largely on the viewer. Agreed that a five-year-old would likely be more traumatized than a 30-year-old if he/she saw a depiction of simulated rape, but even the range of reactions that a 30-year-old could have to it will vary significantly. To codify that in federal law is impossible.

 

I have no idea if they do or not. That's what the use of words like "often" are meant to signify. But the general perception among many white suburbanites that I know is that their kids are fine while inner-city black kids are allowed to behave like animals.

I don't have a problem with select all-ages public computers having filters. What I have a problem with is ALL computers having filters, which limits children's and adults' access to information.

True with regards to the execution of the law, but my concern is that the law has been written to protect children. Does this law save our children from immorality? No, of course not. But like so many other things that our government does, it is presented to the public as the best possible (and simple!) solution to a much bigger problem. Filters don't solve the problem of children being "warped" by porn or whatever (if that even really happens).

 

It isn't about overprotective parenting. It's about the Religious Wrong attempting to legislate their own particular moral code through their beholden slaves--the Republican party.

That's where you're misunderstanding the nature of the debate. Central to the debate is freedom of speech. It is a violation of the Constitution (specifically the First Amendment) for Congress to make a law abridging the freedom of speech. Forcing internet filters on public libraries is exactly that.

However, an individual library choosing to install filters on its machines through no requirement, but simply as part of its responsibility to serve its community is an expression of free speech, not a violation.

Do you understand the difference?

 

In the First Amendment, where it clearly states: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech".

Of course, given that you're a supporter of our current administration, it's completely unsurprising that you haven't read the Constitution, have no respect for its dictates, and would quite probably urinate on the historical document itself, if it weren't protected by glass.

Save your breath. Most of the time when a public entity is required by Congress to behave in a certain way or lose its funding, free speech isn't implicated. Generally interstate commerce is what's implicated.

For instance, when Congress made the States enact tougher drunk driving laws or lose funding for roads, it wasn't a matter of free speech--it was a matter of interstate commerce. If you'd read the Constitution, you'd understand that while Congress is forbidden to make laws abridging the freedom of speech, it is in fact required to regulate interstate commerce.

You might try reading the Constitution next time, rather than burning it. You might find it instructive.

 

While I will agree that religious conservatives are especially adamant in their fight against all forms of pornography, there are more than enough people who consider themselves leftist and are equally against Constitutionally-protected porn. An example of this is Andrea Dworkin, who sees hetero porn as subjectification of women (which it is) and a tacit rape of all women (which it is not).

If a library is a public place (which it is), and my government money is being used to fund that library (which it is), I have a problem with that library making subjective judgments about what is and is not appropriate for me, an adult, to read/see/hear on strictly moral grounds. (And yes, I reiterate that there's a big difference between me, an adult, and a schoolchild. As DrJones correctly pointed out, schoolkids have very few rights at all.)

Most libraries have limited shelf space and fill that space with books that best reflect the reading habits of their users. I'm fine with that. That's very different from a library that has access to every book ever written (let's just say it's part of a really, really big interlibrary loan network) but won't lend me out something because they think it's smut. Who are they to judge? That's the way that I think of the internet: the world's largest library.

 

The States hold the police powers, including the health, safety and morals of their inhabitants. I'll see if I can't dig that reference up. In any case, they are to judge--because those are the powers that we've given them.

There's some wiggle room in there that is not covered by equal protection--you see, the States slide out because they are treating all people equally, whether they are citizens of the State or not. That's Equal Protection's dirty little secret: as long as the treatment by the State is equal, it's permitted--even if it's equally bad.

Well, that's an interesting idea, but I doubt it will hold up in Court. Freedom of speech is guaranteed, but not freedom of access to information. Hollywood censorship is notorious for being the strictest in the world--but since it's not government censorship, it's perfectly legal.