ACLU: Give Students Access to Gay Websites

An Article from News Max.com about the Camdenton School District

An American Civil Liberties chapter has filed a lawsuit against a Missouri school district demanding that it allow K-12 students to access LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender) websites on school computers.

The superintendent of the Camdenton, Mo., district, Tim Hadfield, acknowledges that his school computers use filtering software called URL Blacklist that does block out LGBT sites, among others.

The ACLU of Eastern Missouri sent the district a letter in May warning the school not to use the site blocker’s sexuality filter, and filed suit on Aug. 15.

But Hadfield said the district can’t comply because allowing access could expose students to pornography.

“We were very wary of making a change based on some of the content that would get through that filter that could be sexually explicit and then violate other laws that would jeopardize the district,” Hadfield told CNSNews.

“There’s an act called the Children’s Internet Protection Act that we also must follow, and by turning one of our filters off, there was a concern that we could have possible violations of that act.”

The act, signed into law in 2003, requires that as a condition for receiving federal funding, schools and libraries must use Internet filters to protect children through the 12th grade from harmful online content.

The ACLU maintains in its suit that the school district must either disable the sexuality filter or acquire other filtering software that is “content neutral” and does not discriminate against websites “based on their viewpoint,” according to Joshua Block, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT Project.

But the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a conservative religious legal group, is supporting the Missouri district and several others threatened with similar ACLU legal action.

ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman told CNSNews: “School districts not only have a right, but also an obligation, to protect our children from pornography, and they certainly shouldn’t cave in to the ACLU’s demands that they allow this inappropriate access.