Daily Benefactor:
Seattle libraries will not allow patrons to eat or sleep or go barefoot. But they can watch all the hardcore porn they want in front of children.
Seattle PI reported:
The Seattle Public Library has a long list of rules of things you can't do in the library, to ensure "comfort and safety" of staff and patrons. You can't eat, sleep, look like you're sleeping, be barefoot, be too stinky or talk too loudly.
But you can watch graphic porn on a public computer in front of kids. Despite repeated complaints from female patrons about men watching porn in full view of their children, the library has held fast to its policy of unfettered online access for grown-ups.
The reason: It's not in the business of censorship.
The latest dust-up comes after a mother with her two kids saw a man watching "hard-core porn" at the Lake City library and complained. When the librarian refused to ask the man move to a less visible screen, Julie Howe wrote the library, the media and lawyers and got on KUOW.
"It was very shocking," said Howe, whose 10-year-old girl had seen the man's screen and cried that night. But, she acknowledged, "it's not an easy one to solve."
Other libraries also allow porn
The library's position was mirrored elsewhere. The King County Library System has a similar policy, of filtering kids’ access on computers, while allowing adults to roam freely. The American Library Association endorses the same stance.
"Sometimes, in a library, you're going to see information that's going to make you uncomfortable," Barbara Jones, director of the association's intellectual freedom office, said on KUOW Wednesday.
Stephen Kruiser has more on the right to watch porn in public.
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