The U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will hear oral arguments early next year in a dispute over the constitutionality of filtering pornography from public libraries.

Passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 2000, the Children’s Internet Protection Act requires libraries that receive federal Internet subsidies to use anti-pornography filtering software.

While it is not the federal government’s place to require that libraries use web filters, the decision to censor certain Web sites should be left to the individual libraries, as it is with controversial books.

The American Civil Liberties Union is correct in its claim that filtering software blocks a large amount of constitutionally protected material, such as medical information and avant-garde art.

Many people access such materials in libraries of bigger cities, and forcing the New York Public Library to filter its Internet would be a great nuisance to many frequent users.

Libraries in more family-oriented communities, however, should participate in the filtering of explicit sites.

The federal government should not make Internet pornography filters mandatory for all public libraries. It should, however, leave that responsibility to libraries to implement as each one sees appropriate.