Horny? Need Porn? To Libraries, Yo!
Bye Bye Porn Police
Say you’re a horny, yet pornography-deprived citizen in the DC Metro area, one who doesn’t have access to an Internet-connected computer at your place of residence or employment, and not lucky enough to work for the FBI Porn Squad.
While you could watch porn on the telly or hunt for your naked picture needs in the two racks of racks downtown, why actually pay for porn? You can porn-surf all you want at local area libraries.
Yes, my fellow sex-starved men, we are free to browse babes for boobs all day long in the District as well as Montgomery and Fairfax counties. DC has recessed computer screens that ensure donkey porn privacy and in Montgomery County, they’ll even give you a “privacy screen” if your boob-watching is too much for other patrons.
Best yet, while Fairfax County forbids the viewing of child pornography and obscene materials, “Libraries are not legally empowered to determine obscenity,” according to Fairfax library spokesperson Lois Kirkpatrick.
Oh, and no worries if two uniformed (yet unarmed) men with baseball caps emblazoned with “Homeland Security” start telling you that the viewing of Internet pornography is forbidden. Those two fools, part of Montgomery County’s Homeland Security Department, cannot enforce obscenity laws. When they tried to last week, they were rebuffed by librarians and real police, leading to this classic passage from the WashPost about the incident:
Later that afternoon, Montgomery County’s chief administrative officer, Bruce Romer, issued a statement calling the incident “unfortunate” and “regrettable” — two words that bureaucrats often deploy when things have gone awry. He said the officers had been reassigned to other duties.
“Reassigned to other duties”, eh? How about something actually to do with “Homeland Security”, like reading our mail.
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How did I know when I saw the title that this would be Wayan’s post?
Enforcing a stupid rule doesn’t make you a fool. Writing the stupid rule does. And Montgomery County wrote the stupid and overbroad harassment rule, which the hapless security men made the mistake of applying evenhandedly across the board.
As much as one might desire it, there’s no exception to sexual harassment law for libraries.
The courts have occasionally held that the First Amendment trumps sexual harassment law.
Church theological/sexual discussions (Bryce v. Episcopal Church), for example.
And in the context of university speech codes as applied to students (UWM Post case).
But they have, perhaps wrongly, not given public libraries any special protection.
Library funding can be conditioned on filtering (U.S. v. American Library Ass’n).
And sexually-explicit speech often can be restricted on gov’t property (Urofsky v. Gilmore).
So this case is legally a gray area, contrary to what the Washington Post article claims.
Indeed, if the library restricted access to net porn, it would likely win.
Any First Amendment lawsuit would probably lose under the A.L.A. and Urofsky cases.
Moreover, the EEOC once awarded damages for harassment against a midwestern library.
Its sin was to not shut down access on its computers to porn.
The librarians claimed this created a hostile environment for them.
(They also claimed other things, too.
But the EEOC relied heavily on what was on the library’s computers.
And under NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982),
a damage award can’t be based even partly on speech).
But no one criticized the EEOC for this. They were politically correct, unlike the security men. They were a powerful agency with a multi-million dollar budget, not a couple of powerless low-level security employees who could be scapegoated for taking a county’s overbroad sexual harassment policy at face value.
The EEOC’s basis was even weaker than the security men’s. They held that displaying porn on computers violated federal sex discrimination laws, which are the source of federal prohibitions on sexual harassment.
But under federal law, unlike Montgomery County policy, you have to show discrimination based on sex to prove sexual harassment. As a result, some federal appeals courts have found that federal law only reaches sexual harassment that occurs because of the plaintiff’s sex. E.g., Scusa v. Nestle U.S.A. (8th Cir. 1998); Duncan v. Denver Dept. of Safety (10th Cir. 2005); Brown v. Henderson (2d Circuit); Succar v. Dade County (11th Circuit).
So the EEOC arguably had no statutory authority to hold a library liable for porn on computers unless the depiction was aimed at a librarian because of her sex (which they weren’t). But it did, anyway.
And the people who are denouncing the Montgomery County security men today were dead silent when the EEOC engaged in its censorship.
Who goes to a public library to view porn? Next time I go, maybe I’ll don a trenchcoat and leave the pants at home.