Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for October 2000
Excess Access is a video produced and sold by the American Family Association, whose Web site betrays this organization’s preoccupation with mandatory (Christian) school prayer, “converting” homosexuals, preventing the display of Glamour magazine on supermarket shelves (no, I’m not making that up), and, not surprisingly, Internet filtering. (AFA even sells its own American Family Filter; censorship is a profitable industry.)
It’s easy to dismiss Excess Access as, shall we say, excessive; but AFA takes advantage of the very pluralism it seeks to destroy by diligently participating in many discussions and hearings on Internet access, such as the COPA hearings I wrote about last month. This video is another tool in the process, and like any tool, in the wrong hands it could do a lot of damage.
In 21 minutes, Excess Access portrays a small drama in a public library involving Internet pornography, and follows this story with discussions by “experts.” (Actually, it’s a church library, which might explain why you see a child pulling a picture book from a set of encyclopedias.)
Here’s the story: A man prints out naughty pictures at a library computer and walks into a restroom. Mom drops her son at the library. The child goes to the bathroom, where the man approaches the child and traumatizes him by showing him these pictures. The mother finds out what happened, and confronts the librarian, who says she wishes “she could help” but says her hands are tied because “The library follows standard procedures set out by the American Library Association.” The angry mother goes home and surfs the Web (presumably not with Cyber Patrol, which has been known to block AFA’s Web site). Armed with information and encouragement, she and her husband resolve to take the issue to the ballot box.
Excess Access includes cameos from a series of “experts” who treat us to a vision of ALA like you’ve never seen it. We first hear from a former library trustee who warns us that librarians are mindless puppets produced by the ALA library-school accreditation process, which ensures we are properly indoctrinated before graduation with the ALA party line.
Yet we librarians are not merely mindless, but, strangely enough, wickedly devious as well. David Burt, an employee of filtering company N2H2 and a former “pro-filtering activist,” takes center stage to explain how librarians everywhere use library doctrine to mislead the public about their real intentions. Librarians are “taught to cite [the Library Bill of Rights] in such a manner that it sounds like it’s a legal document,” says Burt; and to further the deception, we are instructed to tell patrons that we are “really going to reconsider [sic] their request, when in fact”—here he chuckles knowingly—“they’re never going to reconsider [sic] their request.”
It’s déjà vu all over again as Karen Jo Gounaud, who cut her teeth attempting to prevent Virginia libraries from offering the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper (AL, May 1994, p. 389–390), opines that “censorship is one of the most abused words in the American Library Association.” ALA has even used the c-word to describe “the mere moving a book from one shelf to another” (as from an open shelf to a restricted shelf?). Gounaud then warns the viewer that “nearly every library” has a copy of that devil’s dictionary, the Library Bill of Rights (it’s online in case you didn’t get one yet).
Finally, in a quasi-academic flourish, Helen Chaffee Biehle, a “teacher, researcher, [and] activist,” waves her eyeglasses as she offers her diagnosis that ALA’s policies “are based on institutional nihilism.” Hey, never mind that stuff about reading being fundamental!
So how did we librarians become at once so brain-dead and yet so nihilistic (not to mention such good liars)? Burt explains that in the 1960s, ALA was usurped by “radicals,” who “really kind of took over the Association and injected their views in it.” Proof perfect of ALA’s moral decay was the establishment of an Office of Intellectual Freedom, with a paid director no less, who had been on the board of the ACLU. Pretty soon, ALA was taking positions on “age,” and even on “nuclear disarmament.” (It’s true: Taking advantage of our open process, throughout the years ALA members—almost 60,000 of them—have placed all kinds of issues on the ballot before the members at large. Our policy manual is a brief history of time.) ALA, concludes Burt, “needs to become a responsible member of society once again.”
AFA repeatedly—no doubt intentionally—muddies the philosophical waters throughout Excess Access. A voice-over warning parents about “Internet porn” shows a child reaching for a book titled Gay American History. Burt says that the horrors of online access include “bestiality . . . and transvestitism”; yet depictions of humans having sex with animals are illegal, while the worst you can say about people in drag is that they’re overdressed. Gounaud says one way to assess your library is to determine whether or not it will tell you what titles your children have checked out—a discussion of privacy rights far afield from the purported topic of Excess Access, but telling in its inclusion.
As the trustee in Excess Access warns, ALA is “an extremely global organization”—and may The Force be with us. We don’t need mandates and interference as we navigate the murky waters of public access to new media; we need compassion and empathy—and more than anything else, we need enough funding to allow us to continue providing many centuries of service.
Now I’ll leave online access issues alone for a while—there are too many cool cyber-tools and nifty librarians to write about in future columns.