From Utah’s Deseret Morning News comes word that the state’s Parent Teacher Association has come out in support of the state’s misnamed “child protection” do not e-mail registry.
The article announcing the news failed to offer a single argument against the registry and reads like a press release for Utah’s child no-e-mail list.
“Utah’s Parent Teacher Association joined with 37 state legislators Friday to support parents and families that don’t want unsolicited pornography in their homes,” began the article by Wendy Leonard.
The sentence implies that anyone against the registry is also against parents deciding what should be allowed in their homes. Throughout the article, it the PTA is positioned as simply fighting for parents’ choice, rather than backing an ill-conceived, industry-threatening scheme that—as the Federal Trade Commission has pointed out repeatedly—puts children at greater risk of having their e-mail addresses fall into the hands of online predators.
“[R]egarding the lawsuit brought by the pornography industry against Utah’s Child Protection Registry, the PTA asks the court to allow it to submit the friend-of-the-court brief supporting parental choice,” Leonard’s article continued. “The lawsuit, originally filed in November 2005 by the California-based Free Speech Coalition, states the Internet registry is unconstitutional and restricts commercial expression.”
The article fails to mention that besides the Free Speech Coalition, some heavy hitters who aren’t normally associated with pornography—including the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition, the American Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology—have all lined up against child no e-mail registries.
Nor does the article mention that the law that established Utah’s cockamamie registry covers anything it is illegal for minors to view or buy, not just porn. Nope, it’s all about Utah’s PTA defending unwitting parents from a porn home invasion delivered through their computers. Granted, daily news reporters work under extremely tight deadlines, but a simple Google search would have given this woman all she needed to write an accurate piece.
“However,” she wrote, “PTA leaders believe the free registry is a significant tool to keep inappropriate messages out of homes where children reside.
“Parents and teachers across the state are committed to stop this attempt by the adult industry to invade our homes and schools,” Utah’s PTA President Carmen Snow was quoted as saying.
According to the Deseret News, The American Center for Law and Justice, a Christian constitutional law firm in Washington, D.C., has volunteered to author the court brief for Utah’s PTA. The ACLJ has obviously been snowed into thinking it’s helping protect children by writing the brief. And reporting like Leonard’s certainly doesn’t help.
Here’s to hoping the court can see this issue more clearly than the folks at Utah’s PTA, the Deseret News and the ACLJ.
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