Librarians are witting porn purveyors?
That’s what a bizarre lawsuit—filed in a Colorado district court by a little group called Pornography is Not Education—claimed last year.
Naturally the group said it was protecting children.
PINE insisted that the Colorado Library Consortium and EBSCO Information Services were sending kids to sex-filled images and text and even the escort-service Web sites and sex toy ads.
The lawsuit would have removed countless ebooks and research items from consortium collections. The consortium serves hundreds of Colorado libraries and other institutions.
Yes, would have removed. Thank goodness.
I don’t know the exact reasons for the dropping of the lawsuit, but sheer frivolousness, as I see it, should be at the top of the list.
Weird or not, the suit cost the consortium at least $35,000 dollars and countless hours to defend against—money and time that should have gone for library services.
As a co-founder of LibraryEndowment.org, which is working toward a national library endowment, I indirectly felt the effect. One of our most valuable people, Jim Duncan, executive director of the Colorado Library Consortium, had to cut back on his volunteering for our tiny Web-based group.
The endowment cause isn’t an official activity of the consortium or endorsed by it, and Jim rightly decided to focus on his duties for CLiC (the abbreviation for the consortium).
The proposed endowment ideally will include a powerful legal arm to protect against censorship jihads of the kind suffered by CLiC and EBSCO.
Meanwhile, Jim sees CLiC’s ordeal as a useful lesson for librarians, the public and the media. He is eager to engage in constructive dialogue with people from all three groups in regard to censorship and the usefulness of libraries, which the former interferes with. Jim’s email is jduncan@clicweb.org. To help Jim, not because anyone censored me, I’ve toned down the language in this commentary a bit, compared to an earlier version.
Censors vs. freedom to read: The bigger picture
Alas, CLiC and EBSCO’s victory is hardly the end of the censorship threat, and the stakes are high.
Last fall, Jamie LaRue, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, noted how morality activists encourage followers to “do complex, multi-step searches, using terms and strategies rarely practiced by students, to get to content that references human sexuality. The offending article might be, and often is, something in Time magazine, or a men’s or women’s health magazine. It might be a Cosmopolitan article about the female orgasm. It might be a small ad in the back of a magazine for sex toys. It might be an article on birth control. It might be a link, in a research article about the effects of pornography, to external sites. It might be a description of a novel (but not its content). EBSCO, and libraries, sample the content of our culture. Sometimes, people talk about sex.” Gullible parents and others then share their findings with the media and at public meetings.
The National Center On Sexual Exploitation has aided PINE, and at least 130 schools as of last fall had removed content. The Utah Education Network suspended EBSCO’s K-12 offerings for some months.
With outrages like that in mind, the ALA’s LaRue wrote:
In short, this is a staggeringly successful censorship effort directed against the public sector. Just a handful of parents, armed with the utterly spurious research and outrageous accusations by a national faith-based pressure group, accomplishes something that does present a threat to our children: It deprives them of a current tool for research that guides them to curated materials from authoritative sources evaluated by educators and subject matter experts.
Since 2010, America has lost over 20% of its school librarians. In many elementary, middle, and high schools, library budgets, never very robust, have been slashed to the bone. For those schools, shared databases like EBSCO (or ProQuest, or Gale products, which have also been targeted) represent pretty much the only bona fide tools for school research that remain. In a time of allegations of “fake news,” of willfully deceptive articles on all topics, one might think it worthwhile to invest in the critical thinking skills of students.
The Pornography is Not Education folks, to protect children from internet sex, are leaving students with the only other option: Google and their smartphones. Students will be left, literally, to their own devices. How, one wonders, will this advance NCOSE’s goals?
For now, reverse kudos to the sensationalists in the Colorado news media who gave PINE’s would-be censors far more publicity than they deserved.
Below is a CLiCnews release that Jim Duncan shared with me.
Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) Dropped from Lawsuit
Centennial, CO— 2/27/2019 — Last week a small group of parents calling themselves Pornography is Not Education (PINE) dropped their lawsuit against the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC), a nonprofit organization that serves several hundred libraries, schools and academic institutions across the state. The complaint, filed with Arapahoe County District Court in October 2018, was the result of a two-year campaign by the parents to censor and remove a variety of educational research products from schools and libraries across Colorado.
The lawsuit claimed that CLiC knowingly brokers various forms of pornography, including sexually explicit materials in the form of graphic images, obscene text, advertising for sex toys, and active links to escort service web sites. The suit further claimed that CLiC markets such content to schools and libraries.
“Librarians occupy a crucial role as professional selectors and managers of content, from books to e-resources… not pornography,” said Jim Duncan, Executive Director for CLiC. “In today’s Information Age, we celebrate the services provided by these qualified and knowledgeable individuals working throughout Colorado’s libraries and schools. CLiC supports and helps libraries achieve greatness in our communities daily.”
Prior to the lawsuit, the parents threatened legal action against Cherry Creek School District, and they claimed victory for that district’s decision to remove vast amounts of educational material from its schools, including several thousand magazines, newspapers and other forms of electronic research resources. Local news coverage by Denver’s Channel 9News, highlighting the parents’ censorship success in pressuring the school district’s decision, rippled through other schools and districts served by CLiC.
EBSCO Information Services, also named in the lawsuit, is a leading provider of research databases, e-journals, magazine subscriptions, and e-books to libraries of all types across the country and internationally. PINE has dropped the lawsuit against EBSCO as well. Although not named in the lawsuit, other vendors of products licensed by libraries, such as Gale/Cengage, ProQuest, and OverDrive also have been cited by the parent group as delivering pornographic content to schools and libraries.
“Money and time spent on CLiC’s legal defense in this frivolous lawsuit could have been better used to support schools, libraries, and our communities,” Duncan said. “CLiC unifies libraries so that they deliver a valuable return on taxpayer investments… throughout our state’s many diverse regions, from rural to suburban to urban to mountain communities.”
“Parents, grandparents, community leaders and students — across Colorado — continue to trust librarians. They are right to value the services and rich resources offered by libraries and schools,” he said.
Photo credit: Florian.b via Flickr. CC-licensed
teleread.org 
PINE nuts ought to be sued to cover court costs.
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CLiC needs to sue PINhEad parents for their legal costs.
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Jim simply felt CLiC needed to move on. He’d rather spend the time helping its members.
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A PINE Response to “No, libraries aren’t in the porn biz.”
As members of PINE, we feel it is important to respond to your article in the spirit of open dialogue, a position we are certain that you support.
This lawsuit was brought against CLiC and EBSCO Information Services as a last effort to try to obtain some action to remove the inappropriate content and advertisements from the database materials being made available to school children.
For 2 years, our organization, at school board meetings, library board meetings, Colorado Department of Education Board meetings, and through extensive communications with EBSCO Information Services, had been trying to get meaningful attention to the fact that the digital content being supplied by EBSCO, to our K-12 public schools and public libraries, contains a high degree of obscene and sexualizing material, complete with ads for sex-toys, and live links embedded in articles to hard core porn sites.
If you are a parent, you understand that “censorship” of material which is inappropriate for children is common place. If you are not censoring the material which children have access to, the healthy development of your child is at risk. Articles, images, “testimonials”, and advertisements that normalize gang rape, sexual assault, rape fantasies, bondage, sadomasochism, and the perks of being an escort are just not appropriate for school kids. Why are our tax dollars being spent on resources that glorify and normalize these behaviors? This is not what kids are in school to learn. Do you disagree?
1. The issue of censorship
To be clear, PINE is not interested in the slightest with the activities of adults. There are many things that adults do that children should not. Adults are perfectly entitled to drink, drive, gamble, use pot or other drugs, but we do not allow the same for 11-year olds. There is nothing unusual or outrageous about this, it is a recognition that children lack the maturity and decision-making acumen to properly asses the information they are given and, so, to appropriately act, or not act, upon it.
2. Are librarians “witting porn purveyors”?
No, but that is a different issue than the fact that librarians know that the obscene content exits in these products and, yet, take no action to compel EBSCO and other database providers to remove the objectionable content from the products for children. Knowingly allowing it to continue is, in fact, wittingly allowing it to be available to children.
3. Are we protecting children?
Well, we hope so. We are certainly not protecting the interests of the $92 BILLION sex-toy and pornography industry. Pornography is well recognized by health professionals to have deleterious effects on the development of young minds. If it is not already obvious, that is why parents rarely provide pornographic material to their children and why they do not want outside agencies doing it, either.
4. Are we demanding that all eBooks and consortium collections be removed?
Simply, no we are not. What we are asking is that the obscene content and sex ads be removed from resources being made available to children. EBSCO has advised us that this cannot be done, that they are bound by contract with their publishers not to filter content.
Given this, we have requested that these resources be removed from schools and libraries until the product can be fixed.
Is this unreasonable? Why would this material even be available in a product designed, as EBSCO proclaims, to be age appropriate?
5. Why was the lawsuit dropped?
There are a number of technical and legislative issues peculiar to Colorado that, strategically, made Colorado not the best jurisdiction for this lawsuit. These same peculiarities do not exist in other states and there is a large and growing amount of interest evidenced in other states regarding this issue.
The entire state of Utah shut down its EBSCO K-12 databases for over a month, citing “exhaustive efforts” to flag problems and filter content, as reported by KUTV. It’s our understanding that the databases are a lot better than they were, but continue to have unreliable content.
This parallels our experience with the Cherry Creek and Adams 12 School Districts in Colorado where IT staff, in 2017, presented an “exclusion list” to EBSCO, demanding that the databases be filtered for student use. As reported by the Denver Post, Cherry Creek eventually discontinued EBSCO altogether, citing product unreliability and dissatisfaction with the “clean up”. The Denver Post also reported that at least two other large, Colorado school districts, Douglas County and Denver Public Schools, discontinued EBSCO altogether for the same reasons.
There seems to be a trend around the country for schools to switch providers, as awareness of EBSCO’s problems has spread.
6. Was this a waste of money better spent on libraries?
We cannot answer this for the general tax-paying public.
What we can ask, though, is whether the purchase and defense of a product, purportedly for children and so replete with inappropriate content, is a respectable use of our tax dollars? Would the tax payer, for example, approve of spending thousands of dollars to outfit the children’s area of the library with Penthouse, Playboy, Last Tango in Paris, and Lolita? Doubtful.
More to the point, the library would never do this, nor advocate its appropriateness. A library would never, so openly display such content on its shelves. Why, then, is it defended merely because it is hidden from parents within a digital collection? It seems a questionable position to take.
It is interesting that you bring up Jamie LaRue. Certainly, he is in the “any material, to any person, regardless of age” camp. His own Library Bill of Rights essentially says this. The ALA states that:
Library policies and procedures that effectively deny minors equal and equitable access to all library resources available to other users violate the Library Bill of Rights. The American Library Association opposes all attempts to restrict access to library services, materials, and facilities based on the age of library users.
Further, the ALA, through its Freedom to Read Foundation, joined with the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry (read, “porn industry”) trade organization to block the Child Pornography Protection Act.
As if that is not enough, the ALA also sought to block implementation of the Child Internet Protection Act.
Has ideology and dogma supplanted common sense and the protection of children at the ALA?
At a recent Senate Hearing on Colorado Senate Bill SB19-048, Mr. LaRue testified that the digital content within the EBSCO and other databases cannot be filtered. Thus, the obscene material in the databases is available to children and it cannot be filtered by school or library internet filters.
Mr. LaRue went on to say that this posed no real problem because there was no obscene content in the databases. I think that would be a surprise to EBSCO, since there are admissions from EBSCO executives that there is, in fact, such material and they are restricted, by contract, from taking it out. Our organization has verified that some articles are embedded with live links to hard core porn sites that, when clicked, display the EBSCO name in the URL, suggestive of monetization.
If, as Mr. LaRue has stated, there is no obscene material within the EBSCO databases why, then, did the entire state of Utah shut down its EBSCO K-12 databases for over a month, citing “exhaustive efforts” to flag problems and filter content, as reported by KUTV. It’s our understanding that the databases are a lot better than they were, but continue to have unreliable content.
This parallels our experience with the Cherry Creek and Adams 12 School Districts in Colorado where IT staff, in 2017, presented an “exclusion list” to EBSCO, demanding that the databases be filtered for student use. As reported by the Denver Post, Cherry Creek eventually discontinued EBSCO altogether, citing product unreliability and dissatisfaction with the “clean up”.
The Denver Post also reported that at least two other large, Colorado school districts, Douglas County and Denver Public Schools, discontinued EBSCO altogether for the same reasons.
Simply, state agencies and major school districts do not take such drastic action for a problem that does not exist.
Additionally, there seems to be a trend around the country for schools to switch providers, as awareness of EBSCO’s problems has spread.
EBSCO also markets its mobile apps which can easily circumvent filtering. Using 4G, rather than the school’s networks would also by-pass filters. Many schools encourage kids to use these mobile devices for class and homework.
While it was clear that Mr. LaRue was at the hearing as a minion of EBSCO (his repeated references to “EBSCO” made that clear) it would probably have been better if he reviewed his talking points with his EBSCO masters before coming to the hearing.
Mr. LaRue further stated, as is the wont of liberal scoundrels everywhere, that the whole pornography-in-EBSCO issue was a hoax perpetrated by “Christians”. Not only untrue, but very unimaginative.
Again, the sheer number of schools and state agencies that have either discontinued their use of EBSCO, or are contemplating such action, takes this issue well beyond Mr. LaRue’s narrow-minded and disparaging view of the instigating “Christians”.
7. Who is the National Center on Sexual Exploitation?
This is a secular organization devoted to ending the rampant sexual exploitation of women and children in this, and other, countries. It is comprised of both liberals and conservatives, religious and non-religious, all with the single goal of ending sexual exploitation.
For the third year, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation has placed EBSCO on its “Dirty Dozen List” as one of the top 12 corporations they have identified as contributing to the sexual exploitation of women and children.
Mr. LaRue seems to think this is a bad thing. We leave the assessment of this organization to the wisdom of parents and tax payers.
For a very in-depth investigation into the extent of the content in EBSCO, go to endsexualexploitation.org/ebsco.
8. Pornography Is Not Education
Finally, Mr. LaRue states that our group, PINE (pornographyisnoteducation.org) “accomplishes something that does present a threat to our children: It deprives them of a current tool for research that guides them to curated materials from authoritative sources evaluated by educators and subject matter experts.”
This is a most alarming assertion. If, indeed, this research tool is curated and evaluated by educators and subject matter experts, yet has been shown to contain an abundance of “age appropriate material” of such a deeply disturbing nature, such as gang bang, Gimp, leather, make your own sex toys, gags, sadomasochism, be an escort, pocket pussy, and other, most certainly adult material, what is the goal of such educators and scholars? What do they hope to accomplish by their curation efforts? What are they trying to achieve? What messages are they sending to our children by including such content?
Again, we leave the answer to this to the public and the tax payer.
9. Has PINE (pornographyisnoteducation.org) had success?
Yes, we have certainly had successes and it is a credit to our membership. It is also a credit to parents, grand-parents, librarians, teachers, and tax payers nationwide that are outraged at the objectification of women and children and the constant deluge of harmful messaging aimed at our kids, which perpetuates this objectification. It must stop.
Finally, the ALA Bill of Rights, to its credit, also states:
Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.
If you, Mr. Rothman, support this position, we, the membership of PINE, would expect our response would be published as a reply to this blog.
Do you have the conviction to do so?
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Delighted to give PINE a chance to respond. I do believe you’ve hurt your case by not more convincingly answering the excellent points that Jim Duncan and Jamie LaRue have made.
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Jamie LaRue is experiencing technical issues posting to TeleRead, but on his behalf, I’ll reproduce his cogent comments below. DR
PINE continues to misstate some key facts. We know from the actual items that were challenged at the Cherry Creek School District that the “obscene” content included such things as Time Magazine. Current federal and state law requires the use of software filters to block Internet IMAGES that are child pornography, obscene, or harmful to minors (all of which have legal definitions, and do not mean “I don’t want my child to be interested in these topics yet”). PINE is asking for something quite different: the purging from all mainstream media publications in the EBSCO database (and Gale Cengage, and Proquest) of virtually all sexual content, including text. No, EBSCO can’t eliminate all discussion of sex from the mainstream magazines they carry. In short, PINE is pushing a breathtaking expansion of censorship. Their tactics include social media smears, sensational claims at board meetings, and most recently, attempts to shove legislation through the state.
Second, the Library Bill of Rights was adopted in 1939 by the executive council of the American Library Association. It’s not mine. It has been a foundational premise of librarianship since that time. I would argue that it has a lot to do with why American librarians are trusted; these policies enable people to examine the evidence of our culture for themselves. And even minors have First Amendment Rights. Students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate” (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District 1969). They also have a right, according to the Supreme Court, to receive information.
Third, as I testified, the talking points of PINE trace back to NCOSE, whose site states, “Founded in 1962, this organization [specifically, Morality in Media, which later changed its name] was launched by an interfaith group of clergy.” In fact, many of its current board of directors have a long history of work with various Catholic anti-pornography groups. I find it staggering that a group claiming to be interested in “protecting youth” from sexual exploitation chooses to focus not on the very real and well-documented sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, but instead the fictitious dangers of librarians and library resources.
Fourth, at no time have EBSCO officials admitted to hosting obscene content. That’s a flat out lie.
Fifth, since the digital content mirrors the print, are all of these magazines to be pulled from libraries, too? In Colorado, in addition to the loss of many librarians, the average age of the print collections are now 15 years old. PINE attempts to lay all kind of salacious claims at the door of Internet content aggregators in schools. But the fact is that PINE is launching an attack on one of the few current and professional research materials remaining to schools. What should students replace them with? The truth is that the content in EBSCO, Proquest and Gale Cengage are in every respect better than random Google searches. They are vetted by publisher, and librarians spend lots of time tweaking those lists to match their schools. That doesn’t mean that every parent will agree with every magazine choice. Under pressure from PINE, schools pulled a magazine on gay issues. But are we to imagine for a moment that there are no gay, near-adults in our schools, or people who may be interested in some of those issues? Or that the only issues covered in such magazines will involve sexual activity?
As I also testified before the Colorado legislature, I welcome a lawsuit that runs through strict legal review. PINE’s claims cannot withstand judicial scrutiny. Indeed, they don’t even stand up to casual investigation.
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