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On September 14, 1998, Virginia Delegate Richard H. Black, various groups
and Dulles NOW jointly filed an Amicus Curiae (friend of the court) brief in support of Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library, a Defendant in Case No.CA-97-2049-A, United States District Court for the Eastern District of
Virginia, Alexandria Division. Mainstream Loudoun was the Plaintiff and
the battle was about blocking Internet pornography in government-funded
Public Libraries.
Delegate Black, a conservative politician and a lawyer, had been the
first legislator to introduce Title VII Sexual Harassment law into the
debate, insisting - correctly - that because " several rulings
surrounding Title Seven have established the fact that pornography in the
workplace creates a sexually hostile environment which leads to the
subjection of lawsuits", accessing pornography on the Web in a Public
Library did exactly that. It was therefore in the interest of the
Libraries to filter it, an argument which dislocated smut from the tired
Freedom-of-Speech-Protection-Under-the-First-Amendment-of-the-Constitutio
n diatribes where it had been comfortably lounging since deregulation of
the "industry".
The publicity surrounding the stand Dulles NOW had taken in the Paula
Jones sexual harassment case incited Delegate Black and Karen Gounaud,
president of Family Friendly Libraries, to invite us to participate in
the historical brief. We shared their interpretation and we gladly
accepted the offer, mindful that the solutions to women's problems
requires concerted actions by many groups. We also hoped that the
ground-braking case would go all the way to the Supreme Court so that the
Justices could rule on the interesting question of how far First
Amendment rights may go before they infringe upon those guaranteed by the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case received broad attention. NOW
national leaders, notorious by now for upholding women's civil rights
only against men they did not like, Republicans mostly, promptly
distanced themselves, taking great pain to declare that they were " not
involved in any way".
Unfortunately, the case did not go very far. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, a
Clinton appointee, prevented it from snaking up the judicial ladder when
she struck the filtering policy down because she found that it offended
"the guarantee of free speech in the First Amendment and is, therefore,
unconstitutional." But the legally important question of Web porn
creating a sexually hostile environment remained, further complicated by
the fact that, in Public Libraries, government is both the employer and
the supplier.
Since filing the brief, the development of pornography on the Internet
has galloped. Oozing from computer screens, its access in Public
Libraries is "fast approaching an epidemic" wrote Mark Y. Herring in the
Weekly Standard (1). Citing a recent survey by Filtering Facts, he
showed that 45 percent of all Internet porn in Libraries is accessed by
underage patrons, to the great distress of powerless parents. It was
therefore a matter of time before librarians somewhere would test the
law.
Seven of them recently did just that. Deciding that they had had enough,
they formally charged the Minneapolis (Minnesota) Public Library with
"creating a hostile work environment by allowing open access" to patrons.
They also complained that "lax Internet policies have created a
nightmarish environment for the past two years" and that they were "tired
of collecting obscene printouts and controlling lewd behavior" Dave Clark
reported in Family News In Focus. (2). Asked for comments , Minnesota
State Senator Knutson said that the problem was "much bigger than we
thought", and that "new legislation will now require all libraries to
block obscene sites". Believed to be the first of its kind, the case
will not be the last.
(1) "X-Rated Libraries" by Mark Y. Herring. The Weekly Standard July 5, 2000
(2) "Internet porn angers librarians" by staff writer Dave Clark May 25, 2000 (Family News) |
