The Seattle Public Library System is great.  My local library in the Ballard neighborhood is one of the first truly green buildings in the city.  It is equipped with solar panels to conserve energy.  It’s ‘green roof’ has an overlay of vegetation to keep the building well insulated and reduce storm runoff.  The branch runs a full calendar of reading-oriented events for children.  Our daughter’s personal favorite is Pajama Story Time where the kids come to the branch in sleep clothes and get to enjoy some bedtime stories and songs.  In every way, you can say our Ballard branch, and the SPL system represents the values of it’s community.  Almost.

If you walk into the Ballard branch there is the centrally located hub of internet-use computers.  From which, adults can be found viewing pornography.  Yes pornography.  To deprive it’s public of pornography would amount to censorship according to the SPL.  As children walk back and forth in the periphery, graphic images and videos are on display and accessible to their eyes.  The library’s solution to this lack of good sense is that they DO fit privacy screens on each computer.  You know, the privacy screens that don’t block out graphic pornography to anyone standing behind or 30 degrees off to the side of any monitor.  Yes, those ‘privacy screens.’

I never thought I would encounter such horrendously bad judgment on the part of an organization that hosts Pajama Story Time for my daughter.  You see a library is where one goes to stimulate the mind and learn new things about the world.  Which is why libraries place such an emphasis on events for children.  Yet any organization that purports to educate the minds of children must show that they can be suitably trusted with the delicate nature of a young mind.  There can be porn on every computer screen, at any time.

One wonders that, while my local branch is keeping the storm runoff on the outside of the building to a minimum, if it can find a way to keep the storm at bay on the inside.  You see it’s the place that attracts the type of individual that would watch pornography in public for free, with children walking around.  Apparently it’s a staunch defender of censorship too.  Unfortunately the SPL won’t be able to account for the personal choice of parents who’d rather not mix children story time with graphic sex acts just a few feet away.