CDC Report Shows Why Teens Need Comprehensive Sex Ed. Now

Health education that consists of only an abstinence-only message has disturbing consequences. By depriving teenagers of access to information about their health and bodies in schools, it makes them vulnerable to STD/s and unwanted early pregnancies. The problems of censoring sexual health education are reflected in a recent report released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The report notes that positive trends in American teenagers’ sexual and reproductive health—declines in teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases—during the 1990s through 2005 have reversed in recent years. Some of the more alarming findings:

• Birth rates among adolescents had been decreasing annually from 1991 to 2005, but increased from 2005 to 2007, from 40 to 42.5 live births per 1,000 females.

• The annual rate of AIDS diagnoses reported among males, ages 15 to 19 has nearly doubled in the past ten years, from 1.3 cases per 100,000 in 1997 to 2.5 cases in 2006.

• Rates of occurrence for syphilis had been in decline for over 20 years. Yet, between 2004 to 2006 these rates for syphilis increased from 1.5 cases per 100,000 females in 2004 to 2.2 cases per 100,000 in 2006.

Why Would Anyone Protest Walter Cronkite?

When I first heard that Fred Phelps, the famous anti-gay activist, planned to protest the funeral of one of the modern heroes of journalism, the late Walter Cronkite, I thought I had missed something in The New York Times obituary.  I combed through it again, revisiting those classic moments in broadcast history that have been replayed over and over:  the momentous moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, Cronkite’s detailed analysis of Watergate scandal, and his unabashed misgivings from the situation in Vietnam.  I read about a puppet Charlemagne that kept him amused between broadcasts, and that he had played the voice of Benjamin Franklin in a PBS cartoon series.  But, I found nothing about Cronkite and the gay rights movement.

As it turns out, Cronkite supported the gay rights movement by … reporting on the fact that there was a gay rights movement underway.

NCAC Files Brief in U.S. v. Stevens, Urging Supreme Court to Reject “Invitation to Censorship”

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week in an important Supreme Court free speech case, NCAC, joined by the College Art Association, warned that a law banning depictions of animal cruelty violates the First Amendment right to free speech, and the exemption it provides for work with “serious value” rings hollow, given the long history of censorship of disturbing or unpopular images.

AT&T Blocks (then Unblocks) img.4chan.org

This morning NCAC woke up to a mailbox full of hundreds of complaints against AT&T’s blocking access to img.4chan.org. The mass outrage over AT&T’s action had by that time also reached the company and led to the rapid unblocking of the site. AT&T denied any attempt to censor based on content and issued the following statement justifying the block as a response to a DDOS attack:

Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact to our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic. Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers.

DDOS attacks are a frequent occurrence, however, and AT&T has not previously blocked access to sites in response. Besides, such an attack occupies a tiny fraction of the total bandwidth through the AT&T network and is unlikely to affect it very much. As a result, an inevitable suspicion arises that it was img.4chan.org’s content that made the corporation act in this case. 4chan.org, a gathering place for pranksters, is infamous for starting internet memes (like lolcats, the “Chocolate Rain” video), largely from mockery and derision, which becomes firestorm intense, and spreads to other discussion groups. Members also formulate and drive targeted harassment campaigns. Predictably, the 4chan.org pranksters immediately launched an attack on AT&T – which might have been one of the reasons the company unblocked the site.

The larger issue here is the possibility that a corporation can block or censor websites at will. Can AT&T do that legally? According to Central Gadget it cannot:

Under the FCC’s Comcast/BitTorrent ruling, Internet Service Providers may only slow or cap connection speeds. They are not allowed to block any service or protocol on the internet. Here, 4chan as a web site appears to fall under an internet service, but it is also conforming to standard web page protocols. It appears AT&T does not have the legal right to block 4chan, only to cap customers who are “abusing” their access to the internet.

And, as we have seen in this case, even before any legal action, the angry calls of netroots activists are a very effective weapon against corporate censorship of the Internet. Still, legislation has an important role to play in this, especially as it sorts out net neutrality, the belief that ISPs should not be allowed to block or slow down traffic to any Website. The FCC is currently in the process of adopting a national broadband strategy, during which the fate of Net neutrality could be decided. It’s far from certain that net neutrality will become government policy either, despite widespread support from the public.

Kids’ Right to Read Project talks to Francesca Lia Block

Kids’ Right To Read’s Jamie Chosak interviewed Francesca Lia Block, author of many young adult novels, including Baby Be Bop, which the Milwaukee branch of the Christian Civil Liberties Union is currently calling for the right to publicly burn West Bend Public Library’s copy.

When asked about responding to challenges,

FLB said: I keep writing. To me that is the most powerful form of resistance.

Click here to see the full interview.

For more details on whats happening in West Bend, click here.

To see Kids’ Right to Read interviews with local West Bend activists, click here.

New Undamaged Copy of “Paint Me Like I Am” back in Landis Intermediate School Library

In May, the Kids’ Right to Read Project reported on the censorship of Jayson Tirado’s poem, “Diary of an Abusive Stepfather”, after Landis Intermediate School principal, Don Kohaut, literally ripped the poem out of the school’s only copy of the nationally-acclaimed anthology, Paint Me Like I Am. One mother of a thirteen year-old student had raised concerns over the age-appropriateness of the poem’s content. KRRP sent a letter to Vineland School District Superintendent Charles Ottinger and received this response. We are happy to report a complete version of Paint Me Like I Am is now available in the school library and that Vineland School District however begrudgingly intends to follow specific policy in dealing with book challenges that could arise in the future.

Parents ready to try banning books again in West Bend, WI; this time with a new library board

The fight continues in Wisconsin where parents are calling to ban (and possibly burn) books from a public library. This time they face a library board friendlier to their cause, now that the four pro-First Amendment members weren’t reinstated.

CNN reports that parents who object to a list of 82 books in the young adult section, including The Perks of Being a Wallfower, “are gearing up for another go at the library, in part because the board now has its four new members.”

See our blog posting (from May 20th, 2009) below for more info and for ways to help protect these books!

There’s no such thing as a “safe library”

The phrase “safe libraries” should always raise a red flag. Proponents for “safer libraries” argue that some information is inherently dangerous, but the First Amendment is designed to ward off the suppression of information. In the case of  internet filters intended to block sexually explicit material, librarians and community members have to ask the questions, “Safe for whom?” and “Safe from what?”  Public libraries, as public information centers where speech is constitutionally protected, should be especially vigilant in protecting free speech online.

Internet filters are under legal scrutiny in two West-coast library districts right now for very different reasons.  One library is being sued for installing filters; another is under pressure to implement them.  In the Washington State Supreme Court, the ACLU is representing three library users and a nonprofit who argue that the filtering software at the North Central Regional Library District violated their First Amendment rights.  They were unable to access information about youth tobacco usage, health issues, the Second Amendment Foundation’s magazine Women and Guns, and videos on YouTube.  Meanwhile, a civil grand jury in Sonoma County, California released a report last week that advised the Santa Rosa Central Library to install filtering software on all of its public computers.

LA Supervisor Rails Against Opera Festival

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich is demanding that Los Angeles Opera overhaul the Ring Festival L.A. planned for next year, calling Richard Wagner a, “Nazi composer.”

He is, of course, wrong. The Nazi’s may have used Wagner, but Wagner was already long dead. Yet, the issue remains, Wagner held rather despicable anti-semitic views (along with the majority of his contemporaries) – should we listen to his music today?

“Great geniuses are parts of the times; they themselves are the time; and possess an correspondent coloring,” wrote Herman Melville in 1850. Creative artists are not exempt from the prejudices of their age, nor are they necessarily good and moral people. Accusations of anti-semitism – not always unfounded – have been leveled at Shakespeare, Luther, Voltaire, Chopin, and Dickens, among many others. Other artists have been notorious misogynists – in fact one of the first recorded uses of the word described Euripides, the famous tragedian of classical Athens. Yet, I doubt anyone would challenge a theater festival centered around Euripides the way Los Angeles County Supervisor Antonovich has done with the 2010 Ring Festival Los Angeles.

We cannot demand of our ancestors the enlightened tolerance of our present. Nor should we identify a late-date interpretation of a work with the intentions of its author: while the Nazis’ use of Wagner’s music associated it, for later generations, with their acts, the music itself bears no anti-Semitic message. And even the clearly anti-semitic language in Wagner’s notorious essay “Judaism in Music” never envisioned or in any way implied the Holocaust – if anything the essay was a personal attack on rival composers couched in populist anti-semitic terms. Despicable, but not a reason to deprive today’s audiences from music that rises far above the petty prejudices of its creator.

It is not music that causes atrocities, but men driven by political interests. They may use art to boost the grandiosity of their dangerous ideologies (as Hitler did) or to score minor political points as Mike Antonovich is doing today, but fortunately for all of us the sublime beauty and drama of Wagner’s music survives in spite of them – to give us hope and faith in the face of petty politics and bloody history.

Infographic: Abstinence-Only Education

To view the full image, click the image above.