Porn lawsuit called censorship crusade

Two parents who filed a lawsuit claiming pornography was distributed to their children by a national scholastic network and the Colorado Library Consortium are more interested in censorship than protecting children, a library advocacy group said Friday.

The Colorado Association of Libraries blasted the lawsuit filed on behalf of Pornography is Not Education and Aurora parents Drew and Robin Paterson as a blatant attempt to erase all electronic material the group does not like from local and school libraries.

“They are on a personal crusade to impose one particular world view upon the entire community, and the targets of their campaign extend well beyond … Colorado,” Carol Smith, president of the Colorado Association of Libraries, said in a statement.

The lawsuit, filed this week in Arapahoe District Court, claims that EBSCO Industries Inc. and the library consortium knowingly provided sexually explicit and obscene material to school children. Specifically, the Patersons said the EBSCO databases, which their child was using at the time for schoolwork, returned pornographic links for educational search terms.

Innocent clicks bring up bondage and other pornographic sites, the suit said. It asks a district judge to stop EBSCO from providing sexually explicit content to children and to stop “conspiring to violate federal and state laws.”

A spokesman for the law firm representing the Patersons said, “The real issue here is straightforward: Pornography is available on EBSCO databases and the library consortium brokers to school children.”

EBSCO has denied the allegations, saying, “We are appalled by the tenor of the allegations related to our intent and the inaccuracies to statements clearly made in absence of factual information.” The Colorado Library Consortium declined to comment. The Colorado Association of Libraries said the Patersons’ aim is blanket censorship.

“Their true aim is to censor all electronic materials from school and public libraries, despite the fact that both federal and Colorado state statutes adequately and appropriately address the need to ensure ageappropriate access to information in our public schools and libraries,” Smith said.