“It’s a new age of book banning,” says ACLU lawyer, Tony Rothert.
It’s well established that religion is often used as the justification behind many of the book challenges and outright bans occurring in schools and public libraries. It’s also been seen right here in this series that the official religious texts of those same religions has come under fire in their own right at times. Both the New American Bible and the Holy Qur’an, for example, have been repeatedly suppressed around the world; but now our libraries- long thought of as impartial bastions of information- have taken to censoring access to educational resources about those religious practices that they differ in opinion from or perceive in a negative light because of intolerance or ignorance.
In a lawsuit filed in January in the U.S. district court by the ACLU on behalf of a Salem, Missouri resident it’s clear that library officials are in serious need of an elementary school civics lesson on the First Amendment.
Anaka Hunter isn’t even a Wiccan; she happens to be part Native American. Curious to learn about her heritage, she went to the Salem Public Library in July, 2010 to research Native American spirituality in the computer lab but soon found that every site she tried was blocked by the library’s internet filtering system.
Confused by the blocks, she asked Glenda Wofford, director of the Salem Library, what was going on. Wofford clarified that those sites, as well any sites about Wicca, astrology, and paganism, were blocked because the library considered them to be “occult” and “criminal skills.”
Under Missouri law, as in many states, public libraries are required to put filtering systems on their Internet browsers to keep patrons from accessing pornography- which itself has been subject to lawsuits because pornography is protected under the First Amendment. Some libraries, such as the one in Salem, also choose to filter out other material at their own discretion. Wofford informed Hunter that she could unlock certain sites for people who needed information for school projects and offered to make more material available to Hunter. Hunter soon discovered that Wofford wouldn’t help very much: she only unlocked one page of one website.
When Hunter protested that she felt it was unfair to classify Native American spirituality as “occult” or “criminal skills,” Wofford told her that she had an “obligation to call the proper authorities to report anyone who requested access to blocked sites if she thought they were going to misuse the information.”
Basically, Wofford was going to call the police if Hunter kept asking questions, so she stopped trying to do her research at the Salem Public Library. She did, however, bring the matter up at a library board meeting that November.
Rothert, one of the ACLU lawyers who filed the lawsuit on Hunter’s behalf, stated that “they listened to her, but they made no changes. They didn’t give a reason. They just said, ‘Are you done?’” Essentially, they were just giving her a sarcastic brush off of their snooty shoulders.
Amusingly, even though patrons of the Salem library can’t even access the Wikipedia entry about Wicca, they can look up paganism in The Catholic Encyclopedia and “Astrology and Horoscopes: The Bible and Christian View.”
“It violates the establishment clause [in the First Amendment],” Rothert explains. “You can learn what the Catholic Church thinks of paganism, but if you want the pagan view of paganism, it’s blocked. It gives preferential treatment to some religions. Any example of a minority religion discussed in a positive way has been blocked.”
There’s also the precedent set by the landmark 1986 case, Dettmer versus Landon, which solidified Wicca as a federally-recognized religion with full protections under the law.
Rothert had remained hopeful that the matter would be settled outside of the courtroom, but Wofford and the library remained inflexible, refusing to give an explanation for blocking Hunter’s web search.
The ACLU of Eastern Missouri announced earlier this week that Judge Richard Webber, in a ruling which reiterates the rights to freedom of religion and the freedom of expression, has ordered the public library in Salem to stop blocking patrons’ access to websites relating to minority religions.
The decision clarifies that going forward the library is prohibited from having filters that block access to sites beyond basic pornography and virus filters that they can legally maintain.
The official judgment, which you can view here, recognizes that changes were made by the library in August of 2011, prior to the filing of the lawsuit, such that Salem patrons did in fact have access to the websites in question in the litigation. In the order, Webber writes that the library is hereafter prohibited from reactivating any filter categories other than “adult image, pornography, phishing, proxy anonymizer, viruses, or web chat.”
My first thought is that if the term “viruses” is blocked, how that will impact medical research on those computers. Secondly, libraries should not be in the business of censoring viewpoints that they either disagree with or have no factual knowledge of.
In a response made Friday to the Riverfront Times, library officials said that they were pleased with the ruling and that “We are pleased this matter is behind us and that the public library and its employees can again focus its resources and revenues solely to the purpose of serving its patrons.”
But that flowery retort seems to be at odds with a fairly lengthy public statement they made after the ACLU promoted the court’s decision:
“The Salem Public Library and its Director were very pleased with the court’s judgment. By agreeing to the consent judgment, the Salem Public Library does nothing more than agree to continue to use the new updated categories recommended by its service provider and adopted by the library before the suit was filed.”
That might sound all nice on the surface, but underneath their breath they’re saying very little to address the issues regarding freedom of speech and censorship that is at the root of the lawsuit- that the sites should not have been blocked to begin with, not to mention the threats of calling in the goon squad should patrons keep asking questions.
The library’s statement goes on to argue that the decision does nothing to change their amended policy preceding the official filing of the lawsuit and deflected focus on questions of whether the library would have to pay attorney’s fees and costs associated with the action, noting that her lawyers dropped this request, which the library says held up this case for several months.
Nevertheless, the official judgment, while noting that access policy changes were made prior to the filing of the lawsuit, makes clear that the library cannot reactivate those oppressive filters as soon as the court’s back is turned. It’ll be interesting to see if Salem attempts to slink back into their old ways.
For more information on the Banned Books Awareness and Reading for Knowledge project and the complete list of titles covered, please visit the official website at http://www.deepforestproductions.com/BBARK.html
Sources: Riverfront Times, National Coalition Against Censorship
© 2013 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions
