Talking about sex can lead to internet filters having a bit of a hissy fit.
A very sensible IR Cymru motion on sex education has meant that the Welsh Lib Dem website, where it appears on the Conference agenda. The Daily Post has the details:
Just hours before the rally to kick start their annual conference the party’s website has been barred by the bulding’s public wi-fi.
It has been placed in the same category of proscribed sites along with hard core porn sites.
But it has emerged the reason for the block is that the conference programme mentions the word “sex” or “sexual” 18 times.
The policy motion – named “let’s talk about sex” – includes calls for parents’ legal right to remove their child from any part of sex education classes to be binned.
The Lib Dem who proposed the sex and relationships education motion, Cadan ap Tomos, said it seemed the Assembly found the Lib Dem conference “too much to handle”.
Followers on twitter reacted to the image, with one man tweeting “saucy lib dems!” another put “I dread to think”.
The motion will be debated at noon tomorrow.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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4 Comments
And this is why LGBT+ Lib Dems and Liberal Youth acted together to have Baroness Benjamin’s well-intended but ill-thought-out motion on internet filtering referred back at a recent Federal Conference…
@Dave Page
Note the last sentence of the Daily Post article: “The block has now been lifted.”
It is actually possible to configure these filters so that they don’t block sex education information, and this has been done.
Yes Stuart but it has to be done on a case by case basis. That’s unworkable and unrealistic.
@Thomas
I don’t agree it’s unworkable and unrealistic. We have a real example here of where it has worked. Another example would be the IWF list, which is not perfect but does a good job of stopping casual browsers from accessing things we’d all want them not to.
The sex education argument against filters is a weak one. Exactly how long would it take to construct a whitelist of – say – the 1,000 most accessed sex education sites? I would suggest not very.
The surprising thing about this case is that the Welsh Assembly filter was not already set up to whitelist all Lib Dem websites!