ACLU Director of the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, Daniel Mach said, “Public libraries should be maximizing the spread of information, not blocking access to viewpoints or religious ideas not shared by the majority.”
Last year the ACLU filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court on behalf of Anaka Hunter against the Salem Public Library in Missouri. As The Raw Story reports, according to the suit filed, “Hunter had attempted to research the religions of indigenous American tribes, but discovered many websites were blocked by the library.” When Hunter asked Glenda Wofford, the Library Director why those sites were blocked she was told that “the websites could only be unblocked if she had a legitimate reason to access them.” Wofford also told Hunter that she also had an “obligation” to contact the “proper authorities” and report anyone who wanted to “view blocked websites.”
On Tuesday, US District Judge E. Richard Webber ordered the library to unblock numerous websites, including those about the Wiccan faith and Native American religions. He said the library “could only block websites labelled ‘adult image,’ ‘pornography,’ ‘phishing,’ ‘proxy anonymizer,’ ‘viruses,’ or ‘web chat,'” and nothing more. Although libraries are required by federal law to have filters in place to keep children from having access to “obscene images and other content considered harmful to minors,” blocking access to information on what many consider to be “occult” websites does not fall under that law. An attorney for the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, Tony Rothert said, “Even libraries that are required by federal law to install filtering software to block certain sexually explicit content should never use software to prevent patrons from learning about different cultures.”
Photo: CCAC North Library/Flickr
So, at this particular library the list of “legitimate reasons to view a website” did not include “a desire to learn about other cultures.” Makes we wonder what was on the list, then. Let’s be real, here. I’ll put my own agnostic/atheistic beliefs on the table. If you don’t like wiccan ideas and you want to discredit wiccan groups, then you should definitely LET people visit those websites so they can see for themselves. Let them discredit themselves. Or, maybe there’s someone who wants to do research on them to write a devastating article for their local church newsletter. Don’t… Read more »
Besides, a lot of modern wiccan ideas about what witches do are byproducts of the Catholic and Protestant churches’ anti-witch hysteria 500 years ago. Some of these ideas were just made up out of thin air by people trying to make people scared of witches, and later people have taken these witch-hunters at their word. Old handbooks on how to kill witches have become modern manuals on how to be a witch, ignoring the possibility that the handbook was bogus in the first place. It’s sort of like how people in the mafia today look to the Godfather movies as… Read more »