Media Musings: Is Supreme Court chilling free speech?
It’s big news time from the Supreme Court and one of the most curious decisions is about libraries and filters. The Court supported Congress’s decision to require libraries to equip computers with anti-pornography filters.
Officially, the court ruled the Children’s Internet Protection Act, passed in 2000, didn’t violate the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. In the 6-3 ruling, the court said any library could disable the filters for adult patrons on request.
Fourteen million Americans use public libraries every year. The dissenters, however, said that the law goes too far. Like so many decisions where readers see the headline, shrug and go on reading, the details tell a very interesting use of logic. The filters, like the Internet itself, are awkward and will literally block important information that has no sexual content.
The American Library Association, which sued the government over the law, seemed to speak from its heart and was openly disappointed: “Forcing Internet filters on all library computer users strikes at the heart of user choice in libraries and the libraries’ mission of providing the widest range of materials to diverse users. Millions of library users will lose.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation – which tries to protect individual rights in the world of technology – was blunter: “The tragedy is that million of library patrons now join the millions of students, many of them no longer minors, who face the Internet blocking barrier to obtaining a proper education at schools nationwide.”
At point here is money. The federal government gives more than $200 million a year in grants and subsidies to libraries so they can get discounted Internet access. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson argued libraries could build a separate system with its own money to provide a filter-free system along with the filtered one.
Olson lifted up an interesting argument when he said that libraries, when blocking the Internet, are “simply refusing to put on their computer screens the same material they do not put on their shelves.”
Hold on, here. Over the course of our checkered history of controls of books, many books – now considered classics – were once banned or deemed obscene. Those books now rest in halls of honor and, interestingly, many, such as Huckleberry Finn, still are challenged every year.
In seeking to protect both national security and the life of the child, Congress and the Supreme Court fear for the safety of both the child and the nation itself. This is certainly commendable, understandable, and difficult.
There’s an apparent absence of balance, however. Shall now, a dozen times a day, a loving librarian run to the side of an adult who’s seeking information and disconnect his filter? Shall we claim freedom when a library becomes a hunting ground for terrorists?
Those are very difficult questions, but spun another way, are we to reduce our new engines of inquiry – the Internet – to what will not offend a child? Have we seen Congress and the Supreme Court increasingly chill our environment of free and open inquiry?
Ideas have no boundaries and aren’t limited to America alone.
So, too, is it true of freedom and speech.
Somehow, it seems to be getting colder and colder in America. I don’t see any warming trend in the forecast.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)