The latest outrage involving attempted interference with public library content, this time, not from the "Bible Belt" like some would expect but from the D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. Details from
this morning's Washington Post.
Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.
The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.
More details, and three unanswered questions, below the fold.
After the two men made their announcement, one of them challenged an Internet user's choice of viewing material and asked him to step outside, according to a witness. A librarian intervened, and the two men went into the library's work area to discuss the matter. A police officer arrived. In the end, no one had to step outside except the uniformed men.
They were officers of the security division of Montgomery County's Homeland Security Department, an unarmed force that patrols about 300 county buildings -- but is not responsible for enforcing obscenity laws.
I have three questions, left unanswered by this article:
- Why are these people still employed by Montgomery County? Simply "reassigning" them to other jobs is insufficient punishment for this kind of behavior, well outside the bounds of their jobs. It's more like the kind of everyday abuses you'd expect to see from uniformed "officials" of a totalitarian state that can throw their weight around and interfere with the average citizen, without penalty.
- What are their names?
- Finally, perhaps the most important question: what church do they go to?
This kind of violation of normal everyday boundaries, the invasion of spaces where people normally expect some degree of privacy, and the necessity of confrontation with other people in ways that are really rather alien to most people, has long been modeled in other settings by Christian groups like Operation Rescue and its many successors, initially centering on abortion but in fact acting with the intent to interfere in all aspects of everyday life up to and including harnessing government to carry out their agenda, which includes both the limitation of expression and the limitation of access to certain kinds of information.
Obsession with what kind of material is available via the Internet and particularly in libraries is actively taught and encouraged by many Christian activist organizations, such as the "American Family Association" in publications like "A Guide To What One Person Can Do About Pornography." Turn to page 38 of that document, and you'll see that they claim that it's all about keeping "porn" away from kids. But in fact, as these two bozos have demonstrated in the real-life space of a library, their objection to exposure to certain kinds of content - whatever they find offensive at the moment - in fact extends to all viewers, including adults.
So, let me think out loud based on what I know about current trends, and ask the question again. What are the churches, here in the Maryland suburbs of DC, that encourage their members to obsess over the private decisions of their neighbors - with whom and how their neighbors have sex, their brand of spirituality, or whether their kind of "faith" matches the kind their church leaders want everyone to have. What are the churches that want their followers to squelch the natural impulse to get along with others, instead exhorting them to be "on" 24/7, to evaluate every decision against their so-called "worldview" and to act against others who violate that "worldview," whether it's to buy contraception or read and view what they please.
I could name a few examples of the kind of churches I'm talking about, but I'd really like for someone to track this item down. Because in all likelyhood these guys didn't just wake up one day and decide to go walking into a library to make a scene. They've probably been praying over doing this kind of action for weeks, if not months or years. This kind of behavior, if it's motivated by what I think it is, is what they think Christianity... um... they'd probably instead say, it's what being a "follower of Christ" is all about, as they have been taught, through seminars and conferences and "curricula" created by the senior authorities of their community like convicted felon Charles Colson! And the more churches encourage this kind of behavior, the more other members of these churches, through financial support, make the "itinerant street preacher" lifestyle viable for young people, the more you'll see other institutions and businesses of all sorts have to put up with these kinds of outbursts and obsessive behavior in and around their establishments.
After all, if Christian wingnut pharmacists are going to get the privilege of not doing their job because of their "deeply held beliefs" that they don't have to do their jobs whenver they don't feel like it - an accomplishment that the labor movement in this country hasn't been able to match in its entire history - we can expect that all sorts of nastiness like this is going to become a part of everyday life, because after all, we wouldn't want to step on anybody's "deeply held beliefs" when they're being an industrial-strength asshole, abusing their authority and taking their twisted notions of how the world works out on their neighbors. No siree.