Wednesday December 08, 2004

Eating The Elephant: A Cautionary Tale

Everyone, from Jeff Jarvis to Mediaweek, is talking about how few people are fueling the FCC’s indecency crusade, so I thought I’d share what I saw a few years ago when I was ringside at a right wing action against the Memphis Public Library.

It was 1999, and I was a reporter for The Memphis Flyer, an alternative weekly. A small group of well-organized, evangelical activists — with substantial financial support from organizations outside the community, including Phil Burress’ ultra-conservative Citzens for Community Values — decided the public libary needed to start filtering its Internet connections. At the time, the library system received two-thirds of its $16 million budget from the city and one-third from the Shelby County Commission. The diverse City Council would have had little interest in meddling in this, so the matter was taken to the County Commission, where filtering had one true advocate — Marilyn Loeffel, a past president of a “values” organization called FLARE that was so regressive the all female board identified themselves with their husband’s names (e.g. Mrs. John Smith) on FLARE’s website. The commission, following Loeffel’s lead, essentially held the county’s portion of the library’s budget hostage until the sytem was forced to comply.

This was accomplished with the participation of very few people. Of the five people who addressed the commission on the issue, two held official positions with the Memphis chapter of Citizens for Community Values and one was the president of FLARE. No one showed up to object and the library was left twisting in the wind. And with no vocal opposition, more moderate members of the commission were left without political cover. One commissioner who proposed a middle-of-the-road measure, which would have called for filtering only on computers used by minors, was pressured to withdraw it by Loeffel and her supporters. In other words, the victory went to those who simply showed up. Had anyone showed up to oppose the commission’s intimidation of the library, things might have turned out differently.

Of course, by casting this as a decency issue rather than a free speech issue, the organized right makes it uncomfortable for average citizens to oppose them, although this is what will have to happen if we want to keep evangelists on the right from setting community standards as they see fit. The right is motivated to roll back liberalism, and citizens must become just as motivated to stop them. And there is much more at stake than whether or not library’s use internet filtering — an issue about which moderate minds might disagree. In Memphis’ case this was just the thin side of the wedge and the thick end was the wholesale regulation of content. While debating the library issue, Loeffel said she had a lot of other concerns about the library, including the “inordinate amount of liberal information” being distributed, and an alleged underrepesentation of conservative material. “If your policy is open and free information to anyone at any age,” she observed, “then the conservative viewpoint should also be available just as readily as anything else.”

“While we’re moving, let’s keep up the momentum,” she said later. “We’ll eat the elephant one bite at a time.”