AZDAILYSUN.COM
Joe Ferguson | March 1, 2013

Steve McQueen became a box office star when he drove a 1968 Ford Mustang GT to its limits while portraying a police detective in the movie “Bullitt.”

In his personal life, the popular movie star moved even faster — he was married three times, professionally raced cars, drank and smoked heavily and reportedly the police once found a hit list with his name on it.

But not everyone thinks his biography — “Steve McQueen, King of Cool: Tales of a Lurid Life” — should be on the shelves of the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library.

The book was one of a handful that have been “challenged” by library patrons over the last few years in an attempt to have them removed or placed in a specific section of the building, explains Heidi Holland, the director for the local library district.

While there have been numerous complaints over the years, Holland cannot recall a single book that has been removed from the stacks because of them.

The district follows the American Library Association protocols for “challenged” books, she said.

“When we receive a request to remove an item from the library, it is reviewed by library supervisors and then by the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Library Board,” Holland explains.

The board then votes on a recommendation on how to handle each complaint.

Holland said a library boardmember volunteered to review the tome chronicling the life and times of McQueen and reported back to the citizen-run group. The book still resides on library shelves for anyone to read, albeit in the adult section.

The library also owns “Banned Books, Challenging Our Freedom to Read.” The book details incidents of book banning from 387 BC to 2010.

“By the way, this book is also on the list,” Holland added.

The most common complaint, she says, occurs in the Youth Services Department when someone believes that a particular book or other form of media is inappropriate for minors.

Two graphic novels have recently been challenged by one local resident and resulted in two different outcomes.

“Gankutsuo: The Count of Monte Cristo” is a story of high school life with characters who are sons and daughters of Greek gods and had both mass murder and sexually explicit references. After review, it was moved to the adult section of the library.

“Pantheon High,” which contains description of nudity and portrays the murder of at least one character, was catalogued as “Young Adult.”

The designation indicates the book is for older teens and was allowed to stay in the Young Adult area of the library.

A book titled “Whale Talk” has been challenged, with a patron contending the front cover of a boy running “was too visual to have at eye level of younger patrons.”

The book stayed in the library after the review, but it was moved to a higher shelf.

The library district does remove books from the shelves regularly, but mostly when they become out of date or have not been checked for an extended period of time.

ACLU
February 28, 2013

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Pennsylvania have sent a letter requesting that school officials at Governor Mifflin School District in Berks County stop using Internet filters that violate students’ First Amendment free speech rights. The district uses a “sexuality” filter that blocks sites that express support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and an “intolerance” filter that blocks political advocacy sites that are labeled as intolerant.

Junior Maison Fioravante discovered that Governor Mifflin Senior High School was blocking access to web content geared toward LGBT communities while researching for a class project on social issues. However, sites for organizations that condemn homosexuality were not blocked. Fioravante circulated a petition and online video asking the school to stop blocking these sites, which has over 3,200 signatures.

“It’s not only important for support for LGBT students and those questioning their sexual identities to be able to access these sites, but also for students who simply want information for school projects,” said Fioravante. “It’s wrong for my school to determine that this kind of information is too sensitive for the student body.”

Fioravante was unable to access websites for organizations like the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Safe Schools Coalition, Freedom to Marry, the Equality Federation and Lambda Legal. Those sites were blocked for falling into the commercial filtering software’s “sexuality” filter.

“Being able to access information on the Internet at the school library is not only critical for academic purposes, it can also be a lifeline for LGBT students in crisis who don’t feel safe seeking support on their home computers,” said Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “Blocking these sites not only violates the First Amendment, but it does a disservice to students trying to learn about themselves and the world around them.”

Although the “sexuality” filter blocks only websites that express an LGBT-supportive viewpoint, a separate filter called “intolerance” blocks some websites from organizations like the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, which oppose legal protections for LGBT people.

“Regardless of whether you support or oppose legal protections for LGBT people, these sorts of viewpoint-based filters puts everyone’s First Amendment rights at risk,” said Joshua Block, staff attorney with the ACLU LGBT Project. “If you give school officials the power to censor viewpoints they don’t like, they may use that power to block your own viewpoint too.”

Governor Mifflin School District uses filtering software from Smoothwall, Ltd. Last year, a federal judge ruled against a school district in Camdenton, Missouri, that refused to remove a similar discriminatory filter.

The letter asks the district to advise the ACLU by March 14 whether and how it will address the filtering problem.

More information, including a copy of today’s letter to the school district, can be found here: www.aclu.org/free-speech-lgbt-rights/governor-mifflin-school-district-and-filtering-lgbt-online-content.

More information on the ACLU’s work on LGBT school issues can be found here: www.aclu.org/safeschools.

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Christopher J. Ferguson | January 10, 2013

After the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, pundits such as TV’s Dr. Phil and politicians like Mitt Romney stated emphatically that video games were one cause of the tragedy. Later, in the official investigation, it emerged that the shooter did not play violent games. This rather embarrassing lesson should serve as a warning about rushing to judgment and the need to remain cautious in making causal attributions in the wake of national tragedies. In the case of Virginia Tech, the scientific community generally remained responsible in not rushing to claim links between video games and the shooting.

Not so after the awful Sandy Hook event this past December. Granted, the murder of so many innocents is a grueling national horror like few others, and such events naturally cause people to act emotionally. But even though we know little yet about Adam Lanza’s media use, and despite an absence of research linking video-game violence to societal violence or mass shootings, a number of scholars have drawn direct links between video games and the Sandy Hook event specifically.

Read on…

NEW YORK TIMES
Steven Greenhouse | January 21, 2013

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online.

Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a negative light. Don’t discuss company matters publicly, a typical social media policy will say, and don’t disparage managers, co-workers or the company itself. Violations can be a firing offense.

But in a series of recent rulings and advisories, labor regulators have declared many such blanket restrictions illegal.

Read on…