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The recent Supreme Court decision on mandatory library Web filtering has me ruminating over what precisely irritates me with the new state of things.

I don’t have an enormous beef with requiring a reasonable filter to keep kids from browsing porn sites in the library, especially given the ease with which one can find porn on the Web. And I couldn’t care less that it’s harder for adults to access the content that they want (asking for things you want is called being a grown-up; get used to it).

Instead, I have two major problems with the Supreme Court decision:

• It substitutes the values of Congress for those of the individual communities and their library systems; and
• It’s another unfunded mandate pawned off on state and local governments.

Municipalities are increasingly under pressure by the Federal government to bow humbly when they are issued an order. It’s a power grab by Congress, designed to establish precedent and relieve them of responsibility when things go wrong. This happens all the time, with budgets for roads, drug policy, and anything else where the Feds want as much control as possible of a system that they are nominally supposed to be staying out of. (This is also a technique they’ve learned to export, by threatening Canada with a closed border if they legalize or decriminalize marijuana.)

So Congress wins another battle in Federalism vs. States’ Rights. I can only hope that filtering companies will realize the opportunity available to whomever can create liberal, efficient filters, rather than erring wildly toward the conservative side, which is the profit center of the filtering market. I’m extremely uncomfortable with a mandate that locks out information on abortion or sexuality, because it’s another slip on the slope back to our puritanical roots, the kind of thing I have to hang my head about when I’m surrounded by my European friends. We should learn at some point that liberalizing a society, while destined to a rocky start due to the human nature and its tendency to stretch boundaries, solves the problems that this kind of conservatism creates.