House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries

Richard Finney writes "US Congress expected to mandate censoship in libraries in a CNET News.com article. " Wonder how close Slashdot is to being banned. I think this is great. We really have to prevent the children from learning, as it would be terrible if they started thinking.

Comments

Nope, that not how it works

[Kaa]

The whole point in laws like this is to empower local communities to show discretion

Nope, that's wrong. The local communities can show discretion on their own without any help from the Feds. The whole point in laws like this is to force the local communities to adopt whatever standards Washington considers appropriate. Look at the legal min drinking age. The Feds cannot legislate it, but they shoved it down the throat of every state (do you really want federal highway funds? Here is how...)

The system works when local communities aren't told they MUST expose their children to a completely wide-open Internet.

I don't even know where to start. First, communities do not have children, parents do. I very specifically do not want my local community to tell me what I should teach my children. I am perfectly capable of taking such decisions by myself and do not need help from local politicians.

Second, what do you think the point of the Bill of Rights is? Community is a relative term, the Federal government is as much representative of a community, as you local town hall is. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is that people, individuals have rights that no government, including the local community one, can take away. Maybe my community wants to exercise discretion and forbid me to read Cosmopolitan (speaking of sex in the libraries [grin]), or to read Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or fill-in-the-blank -- well, it cannot. And why? Because I, as a person, have rights that my local community cannot take away.

Now, it's arguable whether absence of restrictions to access the Internet is a basic right. But that's not the issue. The issue is that the system does not work when the local communities can impose whatever idiocy the local politicians can come up with (and call it discretion) onto their population.

Phew, I am getting off the soapbox now...

Kaa