More than 1,000 students, faculty, and staff at the University of Notre Dame are calling on administrators to block popular pornography websites through the university Internet server.
“We are calling for a full internet filter blocking all sites that exist for the purpose of providing pornographic content,” James Martinson, who’s leading the effort, told Red Alert Politics via email. “Ken Carnesi, CEO of DNS filter, a company with over 5,500 clients states that a filter at Notre Dame can be implemented overnight and would effectively eliminate all pornographic content on the internet and would not block any non-pornographic sites. It would also be very affordable.”
Notre Dame has taken steps in recent years to decrease sexual assault on campus. Those driving this proposal see themselves as part of the same effort.
“This filter would send the unequivocal message that pornography is an affront to human rights and catastrophic to individuals and relationships. We are calling for this action in order to stand up for the dignity of all people, especially women,” the petition’s leaders wrote in one of Notre Dame’s campus newspapers, The Observer.
“Porn is not acting,” Martinson and the signatories emphasized in their letter to the editor. “The overwhelming majority of contemporary pornography is literally filmed violence against women … 88% of porn scenes include physical aggression and 49% include verbal aggression.”
The petitioners also point to the vast numbers of college students consuming porn, both on Notre Dame’s campus and nationwide, and the percentage of divorce cases, 56 percent, that involve one party having an “obsessive interest in pornographic websites.”
A campus-wide survey found that 63 percent of male Notre Dame students viewed pornography on the university Wi-Fi network in 2013. Nationwide, the numbers are slightly higher — some report that 64 percent of college men and 18 percent of college women spend time viewing porn online each week.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education claims that limiting pornography in this way would earn the university a “red light” rating, its most severe designation of a free speech violation).
FIRE wrote that “any institution that claims to protect free speech should not treat pornography substantially different than other protected speech. Although Notre Dame is a private school, it explicitly promises that ‘students and student organizations are free to examine and to discuss all questions of interest to them and to express opinions publicly and privately.’ The ‘Responsible Use’ policy and the proposed filter premised on it both violate that promise of free inquiry and expression.”
Seversal students view this less as an issue of free speech and more as an opportunity for Notre Dame to exercise its right to be unapologetically Catholic.
Martinson told Red Alert Politics that the administration has been “receptive” and that he is “confident we will be able to get a filter on campus very soon.”
“I think the University also realizes that a filter would draw tremendous positive publicity to the University, as it stands with its students in their fight against pornography addiction,” Martinson concluded.
Kate Hardiman is a contributor to Red Alert Politics. She is pursuing a master’s in education from the University of Notre Dame and teaches English and religion at a high school in Chicago.
