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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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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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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Jim simply felt CLiC needed to move on. He’d rather spend the time helping its members.

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