Free to See

In the words of Dan Savage’s LGBT awareness campaign, it gets better..right? Well, except maybe in Missouri.

Early this week, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri filed a federal lawsuit against a school district in Camdenton, Missouri, whose Internet filtering software blocks web access to any online content relating to LGBT issues. The school district argues that the online system isn’t discriminatory – under the watchful eye of the custom-tailored software, any content related to “sexuality” is blocked, including LGBT-supportive websites which offer no sexually explicit content whatsoever. These filters do, however, allow students to peruse websites with anti-LGBT content. So when a gay-straight alliance student group in the district tried to look up information on anti-bullying and LGBT rights, they were promptly halted by the digital watchdogs. Even after the school district unblocked four of these anti-hate websites, they refused to change their software, leaving hundreds of other LGBT websites blocked.

Contrary to popular belief, Eastern Missouri’s chapter of the ACLU isn’t looking to spoon-feed porn to schoolchildren. This case has nothing to do with sexually explicit content. The sites in question don’t have any pornographic elements to them. What they do have – information on anti-bullying techniques and suicide prevention hotlines, as well as contacts to religious groups that offer LGBT support. Scandalous.

The Camdenton school district needs to adopt a viewpoint-neutral web filtering system – the same type of software that’s currently used by thousands of other schools across the country. Using website blockers that lump LGBT support in with sexually explicit and deviant content is not only bigoted, but unconstitutional. Just as the First Amendment prohibits public schools from censoring books based on the book’s viewpoint, our right to free speech prevents public school districts from censoring websites simply because they don’t like the message. You can’t clip out magazine articles with gay-friendly perspectives, and you can’t do the same with websites.

This may seem like a dry issue to some, but for students in the Camdenton school district, blocking LGBT-supportive websites can spread a message that being gay is wrong or dirty. And a public school district has no right to determine that.

By: Melanie Kruvelis

(Photo by Andreia Bohner under a Creative Commons license)