The Kiss

Now that Dick Cheney and Chris Dodd and every interested national political pundit (and that would include most of them) have had a chance to comment on the Lieberman /Lamont primary, I have to weigh in. I think it was about The Kiss. One would like to think that it was all about The War, but a primary is a family feud, and Joe's fate was sealed with The Kiss.

Even a multimillionaire like Ned Lamont couldn't pay enough for that picture. Not only are Americans still not fully comfortable with men kissing each other, but The Kiss incorporates aversions inherited from the tribes who brought down the Romans in 476. It was public. It was personal. It was disloyal. Like it or not, ever since Leonardo's plaster dried in 1498, the kiss has been the image of a betrayal of one's own. It was arrogant for Joe to think that The Kiss could be just a kiss.

Voters in both parties can accept, and even encourage, their candidates' working with the folks on the other side of the aisle. Bill Clinton was still adored by Democrats even as he moved his party to the right of center. It wasn't until he was seen as a betrayer of personal trust that he was maligned by his own. His wife also lost political ground when she chose to overlook that betrayal. That is what The Kiss did for Joe. It made it personal

We send a Senator off to do our bidding only once every six years, so voters had to speak on August 8 or for a very long time hold their piece. A vote for Lamont in this primary was most certainly a vote against the war, but it was also a vote against The Kiss, (and maybe also about holding on to the Senate seat while running for the vice presidency?) Statewide elections are never determined by just one issue (if they are determined by the issues at all) even when the issue is as important as a war. In any election, a candidate asks people to choose him and not the other guy. You can't get more personal that that.

Eighteen years ago when Joe Lieberman first won the Senate, he had an arrogant opponent whose arrogance helped to defeat him. Joe should have remembered how successful was that image of the slumbering bear, an image strong enough to make voters forget even the Watergate hearings. Many have touted Ned Lamont's Howard Dean style mining of the Internet and the blogosphere as the way he used the media to win hearts and minds and money. But the medium that won this election was more old style. A picture is worth a thousand words, and many more votes.

DOPA'd in the Dog Days

First there was CIPA, then the USA PATRIOT Act, and now, when no one is looking because it’s too darn hot, there is DOPA.

At a time when many of us are just beginning to learn about social networking sites (and how they might be used for good rather than evil!) they’ve been summarily banned from schools and libraries by the U.S. House of Representatives. At the end of July, the House approved, on a 410-15 vote, the Deleting Online Predators Act, which calls for any school or library receiving federal funding through the E-rate program to employ filters to prohibit minors from accessing social networking sites and chat rooms where they may be subject to "unlawful sexual advances."

Just as they did with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, those who would believe that a piece of software could protect children have forced their colleagues to support censorship rather than be perceived as supporting evil. Public institutions dependent on federal funds are being forced to shut down a whole mode of communication because some mistakenly think they can stop the bad guys, and others are afraid they’ll be mistaken for them. Maybe if schools and libraries had more government resources they would be safer, but that would mean putting one’s money where one’s rhetoric is. Instead, this legislation denies freedom of speech to those who are vulnerable because their schools and libraries are dependent on E-rate funding to which these strings can so easily be attached.

I agree with the rep who said DOPA "makes good press releases, but it won't save one single child from one single incident." As the American Library Association has noted in their opposition, school districts and libraries already have the power to block access to social networking sites, and a number of them already have done so. There is no evidence of a correlation between school and library computer use and sexual predators. The correlation is, I fear, between child safety and apple pie in the fall elections.

Is this what we’ve come to in our democracy? Our elected representatives can now be coerced into censorship? This legislation is now scheduled to go to the Senate, which may or may not have time to vote on it before their session ends. I hope that once the fall elections are over, senators will be more courageous than their House colleagues and stand up for the safety of our beleaguered Bill of Rights as well as for the safety of our children.

I thank my colleague Peter Chase, one of the Connecticut Four and chairman of the Connecticut Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, for providing us with information about DOPA and other issues of importance to libraries and librarians.