Promotes Public Library Pornography Access

OPINION: WHY TRY TO SHIELD PEOPLE FROM IDEAS?
MICHAEL HEYWOOD, Columbian editorial writer.
Columbian.  Vancouver, Wash.. Nov 22, 2002.  p. C9

Excerpt: And I see Luo's repressive East German sensibility reflected in the Fort Vancouver Regional Library board's strenuous bending backwards in the effort to ameliorate the people who want the Internet, with its dangerously salacious ideas, booted from branches. They insist they do not want to get rid of the Internet but only to assure that people not be allowed to stray into the dirty parts. No filtering measure quite satisfies them, however, and they will continue pressing until public libraries no longer have portals into cyberspace.

"Luo Gan and the Internet filterers may yet prevail in their determination to protect us from ideas and images they deem dangerous. If they win, they will thereby achieve inestimable power over intellectual life and freedom. Everywhere.

 

MONKS AND MOMS WANT TO SAVE US ALL
By D. MICHAEL HEYWOOD
Friday, July 31, 1998

The Columbian

Excerpt: Another piece of the argument Murray referred to as "a 1997 national survey of U.S. public libraries and the Internet (which) revealed that students often unintentionally download pornography while on the Internet. Twenty-two percent of the children surveyed admitted that this had happened in school, while 25 percent admitted it had occurred in a public library."

And so the usual old saws must be trotted out by us despised libertarians: What do they mean by "pornography"? Where's the evidence that it did any harm to any of those who admitted they downloaded it? How often was the downloading really unintentional? And so on and on.

... Murray considers passage of the filtering measure a signal accomplishment of her Senate term. That's sad. But her challengers Linda Smith and Chris Bayley probably would agree it was good work.