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I always thought that internet in the library was filtered. Last week I read a story of a man who stabbed another man in a Brooklyn library because the man was viewing porn at the library.
I checked the Brooklyn Public Library website http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/policy/internet-use
and found that someone over 17 can request to bypass the filter for any reason and be able to access any site. This is very disturbing. Why do they allow this?
The Supreme Court forced the libraries to offer unfiltered. Congress passed a law requiring filtering. But the thugs in robes, who legislate from the bench, overturned it.
To make a VERY long and convoluted story short, the Supreme Court has basically held that people’s First Amendment right to speak freely translates into a prohibition on government institutions’ preventing others who are interested in the speech from accessing it due to censoring/filtering of internet content.
It’s a strange rule, even according to many Constitutional law scholars. But it is what it is.
How is it not indecent exposure for someone walking by to see that?
Midwood Yid: I expect you won’t like the explanation (I don’t think it’s very principled mayself), but here goes:
Every library must make choices about what materials it offers. If has a budget and space limitations that limit the number of books it can have – it can’t have every book ever printed, so it has to make some choices about what to offer. It may make the choice whether or not to offer its patrons certain materials based on a variety of factors. For example, a public library in Boro Park might choose to spend a significant amount of money of materials that would interest the Jewish population and to not spend money on entertainment DVDs.
BUT, a government funded library cannot choose which materials to offer based on the viewpoint expressed by those materials. Thus, library could not categorically refuse to buy any materials advocating communism, a two-State solution to the Middle East conflict, or the Democratic Party.
For the same reason, filtering internet content is highly problematic because it typically is directed at censoring a certain point of view (i.e., pornography (yes, that is considered a viewpoint about various “issues”).
Thus, while a library could decide not to buy computers because it thinks buying books is a better use of its budget, or could decide to buy computers but to not offer internet access (again for budgetary reasons), it cannot buy the computers, offer the internet access, but limit access to only certain points of view or topics. Imagine the library in backwoods KKK country deciding to block access to any website that says anything positive about Jews.
Obviously, as Torah-observant Jews, we believe that their is a qualitative difference between accessing YWN and pornography. But for good reason, in the eyes of the law, the government cannot distinguish between them. If the library cannot limit patrons’ internet access to only online editions of Mein Kamf, it also can’t limit access to only non-pornographic material.
Impeach the thugs who legislate from the bench.
How is it not indecent exposure for someone walking by to see that?
My library’s AUP states that such material may not be viewed on terminals in open space (or something to that effect) but all of their computers are in open space.
The Thugs on the Bench disestablished Christianity in the public schools for us. The Thugs on the Bench broke Jim Crow before it was cool to be against segregation. The Thugs on the Bench invented most of the basic civil rights that people today take for granted. Free Speech dates from the aftermath of World War I.
The Right to Counsel and the Protections against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures date to the 1960s. Just read the dates on the major cases. Recognizable Free Speech was invented in the 1920s.
The Thugs on the Bench preserve constitutional government and the rule of law against tyrannical majorities, and have been doing it steadily for some time. I somehow doubt Naysburg would willing abandon those core rights thrust on him by the Thugs on the Bench like Warren or Holmes.
I would do without all those bench legislation by the thugs in robes. America is a Christian country. Despite what the ACLU secular (so-called Jewish) fanatics would have you believe. It would be wise for us Jews to stop trying to impose ourselves upon the gentiles, while we are in exile.
And the junk that today goes under the banner of “Free Speech”, much of should be illegal with an applicable jail term. Bench Thug declared “Free Speech” such as burning the American flag or posting subtle threats or lies against individuals online.
Or the Supremely bench-legislated “constitutional right to abortion” utilizing constitutional-logic unworthy of a third grader, somehow derived under a right to “privacy”.
So much for all your assumptions.
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