Three Republican Senators are pressing for restrictions on “adult, pornographic” materials in Iowa’s public libraries. Federal law requires anti-porn filters on computers in libraries which get federal funding, but Senator Jeff Angelo, a Republican from Creston, says some Iowa libraries get no federal money and therefore aren’t required by law to install the filters.
He’s co-sponsoring a bill to require Iowa’s public libraries to install those porn filters on library computers. “It cannot be denied that there are men in this state who are going into our public libraries on a weekly or sometimes daily basis and accessing pornography (on the Internet),” Angelo says. He says there’s plenty of modern filtering technology which allows people to do legitimate on-line research without accessing objectionable, pornographic materials.
Angelo cites a recent case in the Des Moines Public Library where a man who was accessing porn on the library’s computer was arrested and charged with trying to molest a three-year-old child who was in the library at the same time. Angelo says a librarian also told him she had taken a group of children to a library computer which had a screen-saver on it because it hadn’t been in use recently. When the librarian touched the mouse, a pornographic image popped up because the man who’d been using the computer had been reading porn.
Senator Jerry Behn of Boone says studies show many those found guilty of molesting a child have read pornography. “This is a public safety issue,” Behn says. The Senators also want to forbid libraries from loaning out R-rated movies to kids under the age of 17. Senator Brad Zahn says he faced the issue when he was mayor of Urbandale and found out about a boy who had checked out an R-rated movie from the Urbandale Public library. “Libraries live by different rules than all the different businesses — the movie theaters and video rental stores — do,” Zahn says.
His proposal would put the same age restrictions for checking out library videos as is used for entrance to see the movie in a theater. “People expect more out of our libraries. It’s our safe haven,” Zahn says. “I don’t think that anybody out there has the intent or even the knowledge to know that any age child could go into our libraries and rent ‘(The) 40-year-old Virgin’ or ‘American Pie.'”