The Spokesman-Review, in the press alot lately, has this piece on the latest grasp to take away the first amendment rights of library users. It includes, in my opinion, the quote of the week.
\”Blaming the library for exposure to pornography is like blaming the lake if your child walks up to it alone, falls in and then drowns. The only viable mechanism for protecting children from the questionable content of the Internet, eating too much junk food or drowning in the lake is action by the responsible agency governing this jurisdiction: the parents. Their guidance is more loving, more educational and a hundred times more effective then regulatory control.\”
The Spokesman-Review, in the press alot lately, has this piece on the latest grasp to take away the first amendment rights of library users. It includes, in my opinion, the quote of the week.
\”Blaming the library for exposure to pornography is like blaming the lake if your child walks up to it alone, falls in and then drowns. The only viable mechanism for protecting children from the questionable content of the Internet, eating too much junk food or drowning in the lake is action by the responsible agency governing this jurisdiction: the parents. Their guidance is more loving, more educational and a hundred times more effective then regulatory control.\”
\”To a group of local parents, however, calling themselves Bonner County Citizens for Sound Library Polices — implying of course that no one else is for sound policies — the Internet\’s prolific, tasty but generally vacuous temptations have overstepped reasonable behavior and have consequently begun to threaten. They say that the issue is a child\’s exposure to pornography (Why is that always worse then their huge exposure to media violence?) and they list various Web sites, including Go Ask Alice, sponsored by that international smut leader, Columbia University, that must be filtered. The 13 (Is that the number of the beast?) public terminals at the library, where children tie up hour upon hour of public time playing games, and where they might search for smut, clearly have their parents up in arms.\”
\”With concern about hate groups, invasion of privacy, credit card fraud, etc., having become commonplace Internet issues, the debate over the problem of public access is not new. But neither is the strength and clarity of the library\’s intellectual freedom policy, which addresses this issue. Passed in 1984, reaffirmed in 1989 and amended on Nov. 13 of this year — a time period that covers a wide range of board politics — it clearly sets forth guidelines that govern how the library must respond: as an information provider that believes \”censorship is a purely individual matter.\”
\”And of course this is what the pornography red-herring threat is all about: libraries unethically and immorally providing unrestricted content to any and all.\”
\”Some parents clearly do no want libraries to maintain the historic function that they have served since Aristotle cracked a book in Alexandria. They do not want knowledge accessible and therefore capable of supporting intellectual growth but for it to be restricted and thereby serve only their parental worldview. They want what Anthropologist Anthony Wallace called \”revivalism\” — a continuation or a return to the virtues of another, i.e. their, age, where libraries serve their fixed tradition rather than the common search for truth.\”
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