Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon may want to require porn-blocking filters in his city's public libraries – he has called it "overdue… absolutely necessary" – but the Phoenix Public Library Advisory Board isn't going along, fearing the ban would violate the First Amendment and bring the city a major legal headache.
Published reports indicate board members and the mayor didn't budge while holding an otherwise cordial discussion on the issue last week. Board member Robert Villasenor, Jr. told reporters the mayor's plan would clearly enough step outside the city's Constitutional bounds.
"You say that free speech is not the issue here," Villasenor said, "but I very distinctly see this as the issue."
Gordon said the board's objection that filtering Internet content would equal the city making "subjective decisions" about what information library visitors could or could not see is unfounded because the city already makes such decisions by rejecting adult magazines or videos.
And the mayor also said the city is not constitutionally obligated to provide Internet porn access to the Phoenix general public. "There's enough private entities, home computers out there," he told reporters. "People can access it elsewhere."
With the Phoenix City Council expected to vote before September's end on a proposal to put filters now on city workers' computers into the library computers, library board vice chairman Tanner Flynn hopes the city might begin to track how many people access porn on the Web in the library, and that if extremely few do mandatory filtering might not even be necessary. "I would like to see empirical evidence as to how many are doing this," he told reporters.
