TUCSON, AZ — Apparently it’s true: porn is everywhere; even in John McCain territory. Currently, it’s on the answering machines and in the meal-time ears of the voting public – thanks to the Grand Old Party.Barney Brenner is running for a supervisory position on the Pima County District 3 Board of Directors in Tucson, AZ. Brenner’s goal is to unseat three-time incumbent Sharon Bronson.
According to the Arizona Daily Star, one of the contender’s modes of spreading the news about his candidacy is the increasingly infamous use of “Robocalls.”
Robocalls are pre-recorded messages that are automatically forwarded by an autodialer to targeted phone numbers. In Brenner’s case, the voice eager or annoyed listeners hear is not his own, but Republican Supervisor Ray Carroll.
Carroll assures listeners that his call is “about protecting our kids” — and that the area currently posing the greatest risk to those children is within the walls of the Pima County public libraries, which he describes as “places where adult men watch X-rated video pornography with our kids nearby.”
Naturally, Carroll considers such a thing to be inappropriate and aims to rally voters by assuring them that “We must put an end to this.”
What does this have to do with Sharon Bronson? As Carroll sees it, she “voted to let it continue instead of siding with us and our kids. Bronson is out of touch with our families.”
He ends with an appeal to voters to “Please vote for Barney Brenner, a man who will work to protect our kids.”
The Arizona Daily Star reports that complaints about public libraries offering internet access that included sexually explicit sites began in 2006, when their use for such a thing was revealed by a news crew’s undercover cameras. Although adults could surf freely elsewhere in the library, access was filtered in the children’s area.
Unsurprisingly, Carroll has long been a supporter of universal filtering throughout the libraries, while other supervisors expressed concerns about maintaining a balance between First Amendment rights and child welfare.
The same year as the news coverage, Bronson and two other Democratic supervisors voted to install privacy screens throughout the library’s computers. The matter was referred to a committee, which recommended that all log-ins begin in full-filter mode. Users could then opt to disable filtering after reading a statement stating that the viewing of “harmful material” by minors is a crime in Arizona.
Last year, Bronson voted with the majority to accept the committee’s recommendations. Brenner shares Carroll’s belief that all computers should be filtered at all times.
Until that day, Tucson area families now know where to go to find free, lightly filtered online porn.
