SANDPOINT, Idaho (BP)–This is the kind of small town that appeals to the American sense of the ideal.
Fir trees soar overhead in Sandpoint, Idaho; trout streams gurgle nearby. Window blinds are rolled upward in house after house on block after block of the 6,200-population town, so whomever wants can look in living room windows and see families at peace with themselves and their community.
But that trust has been violated.
Townspeople are outraged.
“This is absurd,” said Don Otis, who moved his family to Sandpoint from Los Angeles to protect them from the very type of moral turpitude he says the local government is sanctioning: Internet pornography.
At issue is the Bonner County Library District’s refusal to filter access to the Internet on the 12 computers available for Internet use at its three branches in far northern Idaho.
The question first surfaced in mid-October, when the local newspaper broke the story of a woman’s claim that pre-teens were being assaulted by the pornography on view in the library.
“I asked my three teenage sons — who regularly go to the library after school — if there was a problem, and they told me stories that were almost difficult for me to believe,” Otis said. “Like a pastor’s son viewing pornography; like three little 6-year-old girls who happened to be passing by a computer and being shocked by what they saw; like a library employee presumably during work hours looking at pornography. And just this week my 17-year-old said he heard one patron say to the library clerk that he was sick and tired of coming in to check his e-mail and seeing pornography on the screen.
“I’m really cranked up on this issue,” said Otis, author of “Teach Your Children Well: Helping Kids Make Moral Choices,” a 2000 release from Fleming H. Revell Co. “To purposefully remove our moral boundaries — which is what is happening here with this library’s refusal to help protect our children — is to invite disaster for all of us.”
The adverse effects of pornography have been well-documented. In a study of convicted child molesters, 77 percent of those who molested boys and 87 percent of those who molested girls admitted to habitual use of pornography, Donna Rice Hughes recounted in her 1998 Revell release, “Kids Online.”
How does pornography harm children? According to “Kids Online,” it threatens to make children victims of sexual abuse; results in illness, unplanned pregnancies and sexual addiction; promotes desensitization, which results in an ever-increasing need for more violent stimuli; may incite children to act out sexually against other children; shapes attitudes and values about relationships; devalues women; devalues relationship commitment; creates an increased appetite for more sexually explicit materials; and interferes with a child’s development and identity.
“I know of more than one instance where children have found their father’s pornography,” Otis wrote in Teach Your Children Well. “Children don’t forget these graphic sexual images. … If the messages of a child’s conscience collide with the external messages … a child becomes confused. He will try to balance these conflicting messages … . Such adjustments often weaken their conscience and lead them into activities they previously never would have considered.”
To counteract the effects of pornography in Sandpoint, Otis has brought together the 35 or more townspeople who are most vocal in their objection to pornography being so readily available at the library, organizing them into the Bonner County Citizens for Sound Library Policies. The group is speaking in churches and during meetings of community organizations; they are passing out petitions, writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper and making plans for a show of community force at the library board of trustees meetings.
Though not on the agenda, members of the group and other members of the community were permitted to express their concerns during the Dec. 11 meeting of the library trustees.
A woman in her 60s opposed to filtering said, “We need to make people immune to the effects of pornography.” A woman who identified herself as a grandmother of 12 countered by saying she could apply the same logic to raising her children and allowing them to play in the streets to inoculate them from danger.
The situation in Sandpoint brings to small town America the importance of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) rider on a year-end spending bill that passed Congress Dec. 15.
Sandpoint library director Wayne Gunter said he anticipates that the bill will go into law; that the CIPA rider then would be appealed to the Supreme Court; and that the justices would rule against it as they have every other encroachment in recent years on First Amendment rights.
Library trustees, therefore, are not willing to change current library policy, Gunter said. That policy is to permit free access to all library patrons of all legal information available through the library system, he said.
“The law plainly does not require filtering,” Gunter said. “Not all libraries stand that firmly on this issue. Perhaps it’s the education our trustees had growing up, that these [First Amendment rights] were American values though perhaps not Christian values. It [the First Amendment] was created to serve true Americans — those who have fought for the freedoms from the time of our Revolution on down to the present. It is basically what we believe Americans stood for.”
Otis agreed that the law does not require filtering.
“But the Supreme Court has left filtering questions up to local library boards,” Otis said. “It is their free choice to place or not to place filters on systems used by minors.”
Unfiltered Internet access allows whatever is available through the Internet — pornography and “hate” sites as well as useful information — to be viewed by Internet users. Two concerns about unfiltered access in a public setting is that whatever is seen by one person can also be seen by anyone passing by, and that what a porn-viewer looks at is two clicks away from being inadvertently seen by subsequent users.
Filters screen much of the objectionable material by blocking the website from view. Two concerns about filters are that they sometimes block websites that would not be objectionable and that in fact would be helpful — such as a site explaining breast cancer — and that filtering interferes with people’s First Amendment right to free and uncontrolled access to information.
“The point is that people have a legal right to access legal information, regardless of whether other people like it or not,” Gunter said. “For my personal point of view, God has given all people free agency. For example, Adam and Eve. God held them accountable but gave them their choice. They made their choice.” Guiding and monitoring a child’s choices is a parent’s responsibility and not the library’s, Gunter said.
Gunter, an employee of the Bonner County library for 26 years, said he is a member of a Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; he has served three times as a pastor. Married and the father of four sons — the youngest is 18 — pornography was never talked about in the home, he said, explaining, “Pornography is not central to our values so it wasn’t discussed.”
No one is asking the library to guide their children’s choices, Otis said. “What we are asking for is for the library to limit their choices, as we do with a driver’s license or drinking,” he explained. “The fundamental question is, are the library trustees willing to protect the youth of this community through mandatory filtering?”
While some parents would provide the oversight to protect their children and by extension the community of the future, some parents for whatever reason are not able to, Otis said.
“We don’t subscribe to the notion that it takes a village to raise a child,” the library director countered. “The library does not … want to be an enforcing agent. If parents are overwhelmed, then perhaps it is the role of churches to provide assistance to parents so their children are accompanied to the library by an adult.”
There are controls in place at the Bonner County library, the director said. Parents who do not want their offspring to have access to the Internet need only to not give them a library card. Books can be checked out with a photo ID but use of a computer requires a library card.
“This is the argument I keep hearing, that ‘it’s not our job to police your kids at the library,'” Otis said. “It is ultimately the parent’s responsibility, but when you’re dealing with tax dollars and publicly funded agencies that are funded by tax dollars, and they have become the biggest X-rated provider in the entire county, and they’re doing it under the guise of the First Amendment, then it’s the parent’s responsibility to encourage library trustees to make changes in their policies that reflect the community’s values.
“The First Amendment does not protect slander, false advertising, perjury, child pornography or obscenity — all forms of so-called free speech,” Otis said. “We have become so fixated on individual rights that we are ignoring our responsibility to make moral choices that best serve our communities.”
Rather than being an idyllic, sleepy American village, Sandpoint is a progressive community fueled by the influx of people from the nation’s metropolitan areas, Gunter said. They know about and expect progressive library policies, he added. Internet access was acquired in 1995.
“Rarely we would have an occasion where one patron might see something another person was accessing and be offended,” Gunter said. “We’ve counted seven incidents in the five years we’ve had Internet capability.” He was talking about incidents in which a formal complaint was lodged, he explained.
“To say teenagers in our community are accessing pornography without any real evidence they are doing it is simply spreading fear, it’s fear-mongering,” the library director continued. “No one as far as I know wants to have kids spending their time at the library accessing pornography and yet that is the fear people have — that kids could do that. That’s the issue — that maybe they could, rather than any evidence they could.”
Barrett Duke, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, disagreed that fear-mongering is the issue.
“The issue is certainly a community’s standards for decency,” Duke said. “It has always been appropriate for communities to identify some behavior as socially unacceptable. Historically pornography has been part of a community’s standard for indecency. To think that some teenagers would not access pornography if they knew it were available is to deny the reality of adolescent sexual curiosity. A library is a public environment that has a responsibility to the public it serves. If the library cannot make decisions for itself about what is decent and what is indecent, then it is only appropriate the community the library serves make that decision.
“To think that our founding fathers ever intended to protect pornography under the freedom of speech provision is ludicrous,” Duke continued. “While some may argue that people have a right to access any information they desire, those who make that information available are responsible for who receives it. If a public library provides a service that enables teenagers to view pornography, that library is guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor in the same way an adult bookstore would be guilty if a teenager entered that store and freely viewed the pornography on the shelves. This community is right in calling on its library to behave in a responsible manner as well as a sensible one.”
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(BP) photo posted in the BP Photo Library at www.bpnews.net. Photo title: DON OTIS.
