Less than a month after the Chesterfield County (Va.) Board of Supervisors mandated that the county library install filters on 114 of its 130 computers, the board extended its order to include all public Internet workstations. The June 21 decision came at 1 a.m. after a protracted meeting that attracted some 200 people, including anti-pornography activist Donna Rice Hughes of Enough Is Enough. “If we begin to look at filtering as content management, we can get past some of these censorship issues,” she said. “Predators have easy access to our children, and they’re using libraries to gain that access.”
All but one of the five supervisors approved the action. Supervisor Edward B. Barber abstained after reminding the board that County Attorney Steve Micas doubted a systemwide filtering policy would withstand a legal challenge. Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, agreed, telling the June 22 Richmond Times-Dispatch that the way to protect children and the First Amendment is to “filter some computers and not others.”
Posted June 25, 2001.