Eru: As a general principle, labor law exists to protect employers, not laborers.
I personally was fired when I became pregnant with my oldest daughter. At my previous employer, a co-worker was fired when she became pregnant. This cause for dismissal is not as unusual as people might think. Pregnancy leave is at the discretion of the company - there is no law that guaratantees it.
I personally know someone who lost their job when it became known that they made annual donations to Greenpeace, because Greenpeace was perceived by their employer to be a radical terrorist organization.
I'm confused why what a person chooses to view in their own personal time has a bearing on their employment.
Calling attention to Fixer's post:
Well... I am logging in from work, you see.....
Bingo.
No, employers do not perform background checks by hiring investigators to hack into your home computer and see where you post. But they do keep record of all navigation info stored on work computers and they DO investigate that info after the fact. Worker privacy is a big issue in the workplace today.
They don't do this for moral reasons primarily but to ensure that workers are not goofing off at work. However I have no trouble understanding the unwillingness of a poster to have their employer track down a website to which they posted from work, and see there on the front page a bold disclaimer regarding the ToE. This
was an issue for us when we discussed the size, prominence and wording of our front page statement.
Crazycosh: Welcome to B77. There is another thread on this topic in this forum where a I posted a few days ago a compilation of links to sites about the international laws on internet censorship and some of the U.S. legislation in this area, both passed and pending:
My Post
The Child Online Protection Act has had most of its provisions struck down by the Supreme Court, so you are correct that federal law does not prohibit minors from accessing even porn sites on the internet. But criminal prosecution is not really what concerns those of us who are concerned.
B77 does have, believe it or not, many interesting forums where sex is not the topic of discussion. I would like to be able to send my children here, my friends, and even my students if I know them well enough to know their avocations. I am a college professor, and my children, my friends and my students are all old enough to access the ToE if they wanted to. With the ToE having the content it has today, which is quite innocuous, and discussion limited to adults, I would have no problem sending anyone to B77, though I would undoubtedly tell them about the existence of the ToE myself before sending them here, so that the front page statement would not be the only explanation they would receive.
But if the ToE admits those 16 and over ... and really, why stop there? Why not admit everyone 13 and over? There are certainly 13 and 14-year olds in our society who are sexually active and could make the same argument that our 16 and 17 year olds have been making - "I'm having sex; why aren't I allowed to talk about it?" But if the ToE did that, I would have to warn my children to stay away. One is a middle school and high school math teacher, her husband is the same only he teaches English and foreign languages. My other daughter is studying now to be a lawyer.
I can assure you that, where the teachers are concerned, absolutely and without hesitation and without one iota of doubt in my mind, if they were registered at a website where sexual discussion took place with children of the same age as those they teach, and this were maliciously or accidently revealed to their Principle or Superindtendent, they would be unemployed in about 5 seconds.
Yes, there are teachers who take this risk. There are teachers who actually have sex with their students and hope they won't get caught; coaches who molest their team members and hope they won't get caught. There are people who do lots of questionable, high risk things; but we are not among them.
This is not a matter of legality, it is a matter of perception. It is not that I will be instantly fired if the ToE lets in 16 year olds. It is that I will never post from my university office and I will never share this site with anyone, for fear the information would get out and my Department Head's perception of me
might be irreparably damaged. I have no idea where he stands on this issue and I don't want to find out. I just don't want this concern to spill over into my professional activities. Actually I don't now post from my university office and that
is because of the issue explained above - the university does log the sites I visit, it's a cost issue for them and also a copyright issue because I download a lot of material for which the university pays the copyright fees under contract with the publishers - but it would become an active consideration for me, remembering to never, ever log on at work, if our front page disclaimer said 'sex forum - 16 and over welcome.'
There are some people here who post only from work. Either they don't have home computers or they're on dial-up and it's just easier to post from work. They all have the same problem - the problem of navigation info being saved by their employers (this is routine) and the perceptions of their fellow Americans being quite unpredictable with regard to this issue.
That is why moving to a European server does not really solve the problem for us. If there is ever criminal law passed and upheld by the SC, then yes, being on a European server will exempt the site owners from such law and potential prosecution under it. But those who visit the site will still have the url's recorded by their employers if they post from work, will have to be careful whom they refer to the site, etc. The location of the server will not protect them from any negative perceptions associated with the activity itself.
The question before us is not whether some of us are suppressing the rights of others because of Puritan attitudes and paranoia, which is, I believe, how you have framed the question. Rather it is a question of legitimate competing interests. One group of posters want to engage in an activity that is both legitimate and important to them but would put another group of posters at unknown risk. The second group wants to minimize their risk while acknowledging the needs of the first group. We would like to come up with a solution that does not impel either group to leave B77.
Jn