WASHINGTON -- It was reunion time Tuesday on Capitol Hill, as conservatives rallied to decry Internet "bestiality," a jab at overly permissive liberals, and remind everyone that library filtering is not only a good idea but also a very good law.
A clutch of conservative groups, joined by Republican legislators and a blocking-software trade group, sounded precisely the same themes at a press conference that they gave back in 1995: Internet porn is endangering our youth, and the federal government has to do something about it.
Not shirking from salaciousness, anti-porn activists suggested that the Internet was little more than a place to find pictures of women having sex with dogs.
"I believe that a student should be able to search the Internet for information on wolves for a school report without being exposed to a picture of a woman having sex with a wolf," said Donna Rice-Hughes, a spokeswoman for FamilyClick.com who's well known in political circles.
Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America was more graphic: "Pornography is getting more hard-core, including torture and mutilation of women, bestiality and child pornography."
They and their allies had showed up to defend the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law linking blocking software to public funding of Internet access, which library groups on Tuesday sued to overturn on First Amendment grounds.
The earnest exhortations and denunciations of anything more prurient than, say, WB's 7th Heaven were remarkable not for their vehemence but for their precedents: The same groups that employed the same Fido-does-Debbie arguments when unsuccessfully defending the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act.
Of course, they lost both cases. And along with Congress, they have a 0-2 record in the field so far. But the American Library Association (ALA) and the American Civil Liberties Union have a tougher legal battle this time: CIPA is not a criminal law, and nobody's forcing libraries to ask the federal government for money.
Some conservatives go even further, saying that the ALA is acting as any other well-funded interest group that's demanding $3 billion-a-year handouts from the federal government -- and they shouldn't be surprised when some strings are attached.
"The fact is, tax dollars are hard-earned dollars taken from the American people," says James Henderson, senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice. "And the American people almost unanimously think there's nothing wrong with protecting children from this trash."
That's the trash argument again, and you can expect to hear it over and over as the lawsuit proceeds through a special three-judge district court in Philadelphia -- Congress turbo-charged the appeal process -- and then in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Six years ago, when Congress was debating, then-Sen. James Exon's anti-"indecency" measure, he waved around a blue book brimming over with printouts from the far reaches of Usenet. This time, the anti-pornsters are taking a more personal approach.
In addition to Rice-Hughes' condemnations of "excretory porn" and masturbation, the Family Research Council handed reporters a "Dangerous Access" report it published last year. The 57-page document about library activities reads remarkably like soft-core porn, with excerpts including: "sensuous blonde with full frontal nudity ... vivid sound and color ... nude woman lying with legs spread...."
To lend a personal touch to news articles, the organizers of the press conference included two women whose lives had reportedly been disrupted by Net-porn in a public library. Laura Morgan, a Chicago librarian, talked about a plague of smut-surfing that led her to file a harassment complaint. Robin Johnson said her second-grade son was so traumatized after glimpsing erotic material on a computer screen that he spent the following day in counseling.
Let's not forget Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) and Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.), who also showed up. Istook, a chief sponsor of the filtering legislation, said one reason he supported the bill was that offensive material "comes to people even when they're not looking for it."
There's another reason, too. It would be a mistake to view this whether-to-filter debate through a narrow lens. The ACLU-ALA lawsuits and the hostile reaction on Capitol Hill are the latest skirmish in the cultural wars -- and one that conservatives think they can finally win.
During previous battles, anti-porn conservatives had a tough time of it: Telling someone they could go to jail for half a decade and pay a $250,000 fine for typing a four-letter word in a chat room seemed awfully harsh, and the Supreme Court overwhelmingly rejected the CDA in no uncertain terms.
But now, emboldened by a Republican administration and a more defensible law, conservatives are using the opportunity to assail their old adversaries at the ALA and ACLU.
Istook called the ALA an "interest group" with an "especially appalling" approach to filtering software. Rice-Hughes went further, saying that "it grieves me that children continue to have their innocence sacrificed on the altar of the ACLU's version of the First Amendment."
The ACLU and ALA lawyers -- when challenging the CDA, both groups filed independent suits to maximize publicity for each team -- are not seeking a preliminary injunction against the law since it does not take effect until next month.
Under CIPA, libraries are required to certify that anyone younger than 17 years old cannot access sexually explicit material. The law does not include an exemption for parental permission.
