A Minneapolis decided in August to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against it by 12 librarians. The case nails the final coffin in any pretension that sexual harassment law is anything but a call to censorship.
The librarians sued because the Minneapolis library decided to offer unfiltered Internet access. Inevitably some patrons of the library chose to use the Internet to view pornography.
At which point the librarians sued claiming that their exposure to the pornography viewed by library patrons constituted a hostile working environment.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission agreed in 2001 that there was probably cause that exposure to the INtenret pornography constituted a hostile working environment, but the Justice Department declined to sue the library on behalf of the plaintiffs. So they hired an attorney to pursue the case.
The library decided to settle by paying the librarians $435,000 and likely adding restrictions on Internet access for library patrons.
As Eugene Volokh noted in an article on the case back in 2001 for Reason, this case could have far reaching impact,
This is just the latest great leap forward for harassment law. Harassment law already forces employers to suppress sexually suggestive displays (not by any means limited to pornography), sexual jokes, politically offensive statements, and religious proselytizing.
During the Clinton scandals, employment experts sensibly suggested that employers had to suppress Clinton-Lewinsky jokes, because such jokes might have helped create a “sexually hostile work environment.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has argued that “educational harassment law” — a body of law developed by analogy to workplace harassment law — requires universities to implement student speech codes. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has likewise argued that public accommodations harassment law outlaws American Indian team names and mascots, on the grounds that such symbols are racially offensive. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination forced a Boston bar to take down a display that supposedly expressed racist viewpoints.
Ah what a brave new world harassment law has opened up.
Sources:
Library settles with workers who sued over hostile work environment. WCCO.Com, August 15, 2003.