Librarians 1, Little Girl 0

Neptunus Lex is one of my favorite blogs. He posts often and I read him several times a day. Well, Lex has an interesting post about librarians, an abducted little girl and the Constitution.

I am sure that the brave librarians feel that they did the right thing in protecting the nation and all of our Constitutional rights in the face of the bully policemen   “…… Sorry ’bout the girl but, well, there are priorities……..”

I tend to agree with the first commenter who says:

IMHO, public access computers are just that – public access. There should be no implied amount of privacy – the computers belong to the city, and therefore the city (or its appointed officials) have every right to take them back and/or pull them as they see fit.

 But I have a couple of questions ratt’lin around inside there….

1) in this day and age where even my mother (and I am old, remember…) uses a computer at home, who uses a computer at the library except for legit research like, I dunno, a term paper or something like that where the computer just happens to be convenient. Except maybe for people who know that they can use public computers for ill doing because they know that brave, little, female librarians will protect them.

2) Who’s civil rights trump who’s here. I mean, do the rights of those students doing research for their term paper on the public computers trump the police efforts to save the little girl’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  I am guessing that if you had asked everyone using the computers at the time, the students would have said, go for it.  I would wonder about the ones who didn’t

3) Who the hell appointed librarians as Constitutional watchdogs for the general public anyway.  Seems to me that they have, for the most part, an over inflated sense of self importance over the past few years.  I’ll bet you that if you checked into it, Judith and Amy are far left and belong to at least one group who is against the patriot Act (not that the PA mattered in this case).  Sounds like a possibly political stand vs. a principled one.

I have no idea why the police could not have had a warrant before they showed up.  That’s another question. But why in the hell couldn’t the librarian have said “have at it, we’ll sort out the details later” and helped try to save the girl’s life. I mean, isn’t that what the courts are for?  I am sure the only people who would have objected are the ones with something to hide and they would probably be hard pressed to take any action.

Frankly, if I lived in that county I would press to have all computers removed from all the libraries.  That might help to solve more than one problem.

The librarian didn’t stand on principle, she may have inadvertently helped in the killing of an innocent child by making it more difficult for the police to find her, for what amounts to a political stand.  I hope she chokes on it. 

What ever happened to commom sense and common decency?