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Missouri School Web-Filter Case

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued a Missouri school district in federal court over the district's Internet-filtering software. According to the complaint, the filter "blocks websites supporting or advocating on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) people but permits access to websites that condemn homosexuality or oppose legal protections for LGBT people." In one example, the complaint asserts that the filter blocks a web address for the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision (holding that a Texas law criminalizing same-sex intimate sexual conduct was unconstitutional) but does not block web addresses for the Court's 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision (upholding a Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy and later overruled by Lawrence). The problem seems to be that the filter categorizes many pro-LGBT sites as "sexual" and groups these URLs with pornography sites while it categorizes many websites opposing homosexuality and same-sex legal protections as "religious" and therefore acceptable. Last month, District Court Judge Nanette Laughrey granted the ACLU's motion for a preliminary junction on First Amendment grounds. Judge Laughrey ordered the school to discontinue its use of the filtering software as currently configured. See an article on the case in today's New York Times.