Virginia’s law requiring state workers to get permission before looking at sexually explicit material in cyberspace has gone all but forgotten – except by those state workers who need to review sexually-oriented or sexually-referential material for purposes having nothing to do with adult entertainment.
"I suppose I'm probably the only person in the state of Virginia who follows it, but I figure the state spent a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of energy on that law, so I feel like I'm obligated to make a point about what it does to academic freedom," William and Mary College English professor Terry Meyers – who asked permission from his dean before looking up a passage of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun online – told the Washington Post.
The 1996 law made Virginia the only state in the U.S. to require state workers to get that kind of permission, with the only exemption going to law enforcement. Educators challenged the law right after it went into effect but lost when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001 declined to hear a challenge to the law. And while most have forgotten about the law, those who haven’t – while admitting it isn’t much mentioned and enforced less often than that – think it’s a dubious law at best.
Meyers told the Post the law weakens academic freedom and offers a “lurking threat” of selective enforcement by unscrupulous supervisors against unpopular workers. But it isn’t just educators who feel edgy about the law, the Post said, citing social workers probing sex abuse or public health workers monitoring sexually transmitted diseases “forced to abide by strict rules for Internet access.”
Still, the academics may well enough be the most vocal against the law, even if they don’t all challenge it the way Meyers has at his own campus. “The Hawthorne passage in question describes a real statue of a satyr by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles,” the Post said of the Hawthorne material Meyers sought to research. “Rather than risk a potentially unlawful look at any visual aids accompanying the text, Meyers did what he's done about a dozen times a year since the law was enacted – he sent an email message to his boss and waited.”
Former William and Mary Provost dean of School of Arts and Sciences Geoff Feiss, now the school’s provost, told the paper he dislikes the law as deeply as Meyers but reviewed and responded to all Meyers’ emails and requests for searches involving “racy paintings and statues or sexually suggestive Victorian poems.” Feiss also told the paper he left instructions with his successor to rubber-stamp all Meyer requests.
"I suppose if I had been a vigilant administrator,” Feiss told the Post, “I would have gone and visited them myself, but then I would have to get permission from somebody above me to visit them. I went along with this mainly to humor Terry."
The author of the law is not amused. Virginia delegate Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) thinks those like Meyers and Feiss are being “deliberately obtuse and overly literal” in reading the law. "They can read Chaucer any time they want,” Marshall told the Post. “If they can't tell the difference between titillation and mere reading, then they probably shouldn't be professors."
Marshall wrote the law after one college professor complained about pranksters leaving porn images on college computers. "It originally started with a professor who thought... coeds shouldn't be subjected to this,” he told the paper. “Now, is that paternalistic? Maybe. I don't care."
Earlier this year, a Virginia porn law limiting Internet display of adult material t minors was called unconstitutional by a three-judge panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. "The blanket prohibition of adult commercial speech that the statute imposes," wrote federal judge James R. Spencer, who sat on the appellate court in the case, "violates the First Amendment."
Fourth Circuit Judge Paul V. Niemeyer dissented, saying that if what he called the "narrowly tailored" state porn law "does not survive strict scrutiny," states would have no alternative "but to abandon efforts to regulate Internet-based pornography deemed harmful to juveniles."
