FC: Conservatives rally on Capitol Hill to defend filtering

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42523,00.html
   
   Library Smut Snit Heats Up
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   2:00 a.m. Mar. 21, 2001 PST
   
   WASHINGTON -- It was reunion time Tuesday on Capitol Hill, as
   conservatives rallied to decry Internet "bestiality," a jab at overly
   permissive liberals, and remind everyone that library filtering is not
   only a good idea but also a very good law.
   
   A clutch of conservative groups, joined by Republican legislators and
   a blocking-software trade group, sounded precisely the same themes at
   a press conference that they gave back in 1995: Internet porn is
   endangering our youth, and the federal government has to do something
   about it.
   
   Not shirking from salaciousness, anti-porn activists suggested that
   the Internet was little more than a place to find pictures of women
   having sex with dogs.
   
   "I believe that a student should be able to search the Internet for
   information on wolves for a school report without being exposed to a
   picture of a woman having sex with a wolf," said Donna Rice-Hughes, a
   spokeswoman for FamilyClick.com who's well known in political circles.
   
   Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America was more graphic:
   "Pornography is getting more hard-core, including torture and
   mutilation of women, bestiality and child pornography."
   
   They and their allies had showed up to defend the Children's Internet
   Protection Act, a federal law linking blocking software to public
   funding of Internet access, which library groups on Tuesday sued to
   overturn on First Amendment grounds.
   
   The earnest exhortations and denunciations of anything more prurient
   than, say, WB's 7th Heaven were remarkable not for their vehemence but
   for their precedents: The same groups employed the same
   Fido-does-Debbie arguments when unsuccessfully defending the
   Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act.

[...]



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