THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

I am a conservative Republican and a librarian and I can say with all honesty that the Internet Protection Act is a disaster for libraries and children alike (Claudia Winkler, Liberal Perversity). A little protection is not better than no protection at all, it is worse. I have seen a 7-year-old defeat the most filtered system in my state. He didn't even know what he was looking at; he was just proud of his ability to do it and was showing everyone--including the members of a librarians' workshop on filtering who were on their lunch break. Filtering merely gives everyone a false sense of security.

Filters do not work and cannot be made to work. If the Supreme Court cannot define obscenity beyond "I know it when I see it," how can a few lines of computer code?

Internet porn is foul and disgusting, but filters change nothing. I had to deal with porn before filters and I will have to deal with it after. And dumping the problem on libraries is just as foul and the most foul porn. Libraries have the little funding to deal with Internet porn. We have limited computer expertise. But it is easy for politicians to say, "You libraries should spend the money to fix it!" Then they can thump their chests, say they protected children, and hold out their hands for campaign donations.

This is cowardice. Real leaders would invest in the hard work of policing the Internet, prosecuting pornographers, and putting them in prison.

The idiot supporters of the Child Internet Protection Act made it very difficult to be both a conservative Republican and a librarian. Could we please try some common sense?

--Robert Finch

I wonder how liberal ideologues would feel about children using state-funded library computers to fill their heads with information from sites promoting the views of "organized religion."

Were that a child's source of religious instruction, the ACLU would probably have made the case to enjoin such activity.

--Peter Byrnes Jr.

Though I don't believe the Internet Protection Act case presents much in the way of a First Amendment issue, I disagree with Claudia Winkler's suggestion that an absolutist approach to First Amendment rights is necessarily the province of liberals. Indeed, it only seems so when the subject is pornography. Move to a subject like racist speech and you'll find a number of liberals seeking to curtail free speech rights.

An absolutist approach to free speech stems ultimately from a recognition that no other approach makes sense. Non-absolutism necessarily cedes some control of speech to the government--and almost inevitably so on the basis of viewpoint.

Also as a pure matter of textualism, the language "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech" is an absolute command. (And textualism is surely more in the realm of conservatives.)

--William Rohner, Chicago, IL

David Brooks should know that the reason the economists are studying taxi drivers is precisely the reason he gives for not studying them: They are "pure" economic units and thus are suitable for determining the effects of economic incentives (Taxicab Confessions).