The Palm Beach
County, Fla., school district has blocked student
access to numerous Web sites that promote gay rights and
support gay youths while allowing access to a host of
sites that oppose equality and denounce homosexuality,
the Palm Beach Post reports. Many Web sites are
off-limits to Palm Beach County students because they
promote violence, racism, and pornography, but some people
are accusing the district of antigay bias.
Among the sites
students are allowed to surf are those for the
"ex-gay" group National Association for Research and Therapy
of Homosexuality, the notoriously antigay Traditional
Values Coalition, the American Family Association, and
Focus on the Family. But when students or teachers try
to log on to gay-positive sites such as the Gay and
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; Parents,Families, and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays; or the Gay-Straight
Alliance Network, they are greeted with a notice that
says the site is blocked.
Bob LaRocca, who
oversees computer security, told the Post the
district's filtering software automatically blocks
sites to comply with the Child Online Protection Act
and the Children Internet Protection Act. He also pointed
out that content is not the only factor. The district
also blocks sites with chat rooms to avoid viruses.
LaRocca he said
the sites may be fine for high school students, but
concern about younger students accessing them keeps them
off-limits for everyone. "Someday, when we can
differentiate who is going through the sites, things
may change," he told the Post. "But there is no
technology out there to do that. When you have 200,000
users, how do you judge how old someone is? It's
impossible, so we have to treat it so it's the youngest
child."
Forest Hill High
School teacher Michael Wood, who served as the sponsor
for Boynton Beach High's gay-straight alliance last year,
said blocking gay advocacy Web sites sends a negative
message to students. "One of the things we tell kids
is that when you hit the firewall, it's a bad thing,"
he told the Post. "I agree with filtering, but now
they are going to see 'gay/lesbian' and associate that with
something that is bad."
The censorship
prompted the Palm Beach Human Rights Council--access
to its site also is blocked--to reach out to the
American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal, a
civil rights group, for help. James Green, an ACLU
lawyer, plans to review the case this week. The ACLU has
sued in the past over censorship on the Web. In 2002
the Georgia ACLU filed a free-speech lawsuit on behalf
of the Gay Guardian newspaper, claiming that a
public library banned the newspaper from the library's
free literature area. (The Advocate)
