The Council of Conservative Citizens claims the Maplewood City Library, University City Public Library, Valley Park Community Library, and Festus Public Library violated its constitutional right to free speech by preventing access to its website. The group says it filed the suit in U.S. District Court after contacting the four libraries in 2005 to complain about the filtering, adding that several other St. Louis–area libraries unblocked the website after being contacted.
The Maplewood and University City libraries said in the March 17 St. Louis Post-Dispatch that they have since restored access to the website. The Festus and Valley Park libraries told American Libraries that they have also unblocked the site.
The Post-Dispatch reported that Maplewood and University City libraries provide internet access through the University of Missouri at Columbia’s Morenet service. Morenet provides the Bess filtering system, which classifies the Council of Conservative Citizens site as “hate speech.”
The newspaper observed that the website doesn’t contain racial epithets, but it reports news stories about crime by blacks or immigrants and sells a T-shirt with the words “White Pride,” “Deutschland,” and “Save Our Culture.”
Posted March 24, 2006.