Today is 鈥� a designated day within Banned Books Week 鈥� which is sponsored by our friends at the and designed to raise awareness of the overly restrictive blocking of legitimate, educational websites and academically useful social networking tools in schools and school libraries. At the 老澳门开奖结果 LGBT Project, this is a subject near and dear to our hearts, and today we鈥檙e releasing a new report about our work to fight back against banned websites.
The report is part of the 老澳门开奖结果鈥檚 鈥淒on鈥檛 Filter Me鈥� campaign, which started over a year and a half ago to take on viewpoint-discriminatory censorship of positive LGBT web content in public schools nationwide. While most public schools use web filtering software to block students鈥� access to pornographic websites, in accordance with federal law, we found that many of the most commonly used school web filtering software packages were also blocking websites that contain information about LGBT issues and organizations 鈥� sites that aren鈥檛 sexually explicit in any way. At the same time, most of those software packages did allow access to anti-gay websites. This viewpoint discrimination violates students鈥� rights under the First Amendment.
When we for students across the U.S. to let us know if their schools鈥� web filters discriminated on the basis of viewpoint in this way, we heard from students from all over. For example, Justin Rodriguez, a student from Vineland, New Jersey, was trying to do research on Harvey Milk, one of the nation's first openly gay elected officials, but found that sites about Milk were blocked. 鈥淪eeing all these websites that are considered somehow unacceptable because of something I am was really offensive to me,鈥� Justin told us. Another student, Melina Zancanella, the president of the gay-straight alliance club at a high school in Oroville, California, told us, "I tried to look up ways our gay-straight alliance club could help stop teen suicide, but the websites were blocked. It's really unfair that our school is blocking this information from us."
Today, , seems like the perfect time to us to issue our final report on the results of the 鈥淒on鈥檛 Filter Me鈥� campaign. The report details how we first got dozens of individual schools to end their discriminatory web filtering practices, went on to successfully sue a school district in Missouri that refused to change its filtering software even after we explained to them how it violated students鈥� rights, and ultimately got most of the filtering software companies used in thousands of school districts across the U.S. to stop discriminating against pro-LGBT points of view. So check out our report for more details!
The 老澳门开奖结果 believes that the suppression of words, images, or ideas that some people think are "offensive," 鈥� whether they happen to appear in books or on websites 鈥� is a violation of our First Amendment rights. We believe in an educated citizenry and a society where ideas are openly disseminated, discussed, and debated. And you can be sure that we鈥檒l continue to protect the right to access information (and the right to make up your own mind) for many years to come.
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