2,000 Cyberporn Protesters Rally
at Chicago Public Library
Some 2,000 people converged outside Chicago Public Library’s downtown Harold Washington Library Center May 26 to protest the library’s longstanding opposition to filtering Internet workstations. Carrying typeset placards that read “No dime of mine for library porn,” many of the demonstrators belonged to two Baptist churches whose pastors had rallied their congregants to participate.
“It’s just plain old common sense that we have some kind of filtering system,” Rev. James Meeks of the Salem Baptist Church said in the May 27 Chicago Tribune, explaining that activists had decided on the rally because the CPL board refused to change library policy after meeting May 21 with Meeks and Bishop Larry Trotter of the Sweet Holy Spirit Baptist Church. Trotter told the newspaper that he became concerned in February after a church deacon noticed an 8-year-old accessing sexually explicit material at a CPL branch.
“There’s a lot of fear about the Internet, justifiably so,” CPL Commissioner Mary Dempsey said in the May 22 Chicago Sun-Times, adding, “On the rare occasion [children] get into something where they shouldn’t be, we get them out of it.”
In a May 26 statement e-mailed to the American Library Association’s intellectual-freedom discussion group, antipornography activist and CPL librarian Laura G. Morgan urged, “Please join with our coalition in demanding that Internet pornography Web sites be blocked on all library computers.”
Posted June 3, 2002.
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