Boston.com: Neither a porn borrower nor a lender be Jonah Goldberg
Of course you’ve heard some version of this tale before. Winston Churchill says to a woman at a party, “Madam, would you sleep with me for 5 million pounds?”
The woman stammers: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill. Well, yes, I suppose …”
Churchill interrupts: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”
The woman responds immediately: “What? Of course not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!”
To which the British bulldog replied: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.”
The story comes to mind upon hearing the news that the New York Public Library has gotten into the porn business. “With adults, anything that you can get on the Internet, you can legally get on a computer in the library,” explained an official. “It’s difficult, but we err on the side of free and open access.”
What does this have to do with the Churchill story? Well, imagine you went to your local library in, say, 1989 — or some other year before Al Gore invented the Internet. …
… The marginal cost of obtaining pornographic materials in libraries, once prohibitively high, is now nearly nonexistent [due to the internet]. In fact, it’s actually cheaper just to let it all flood in. Who wants to deal with the filters, blockers and monitors? Just proclaim that the First Amendment requires unfettered access to porn.
But, again, just imagine there was no Internet, and all two-dimensional smut was still on paper, celluloid or magnetic tape. Now imagine trying to argue before a cash-strapped city council that the public library must not only provide some porn — free of charge! — to the public, but that it must provide mountains of it free of charge to the public, all because the First Amendment says so. You’d be laughed out of the room.
Did the First Amendment change with the invention of the Internet? Of course not. What changed is that librarians lost both the “scarce resources” excuse and the backbone to invoke any other rationale — decency, child welfare, hygiene, safety, etc. — for barring it from public libraries.
Technological progress poses such challenges. Don’t get me wrong: I love technological progress. But technology makes life easier, and when life is easier, it’s harder to stick to the rules that were once essential to getting by in life. …
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