Can't we just all calm down and act like adults?

Pornography is a hot issue, and coming out against it sure makes politicians look good. So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when County Exec Maggie Brooks came out swinging after Channel 10's big expose last week. Channel 10 visited the downtown library branch half a dozen times during its investigation, and "on nearly every visit," said reporter Brett Davidson, "we found someone looking at porn."

The Channel 10 reporters witnessed, among other things, "a man viewing images of naked people engaged in sexual acts," said Davidson. "Standing nearby, we could see it all."

The Channel 10 team also saw a man looking at images on boylovesites.com. The reporters got his name and learned later from police that the man was on probation. The offense: "he offered a 14-year-old boy money to see his privates and touched him inappropriately," said the Channel 10 report.

Computers at libraries have filters to block pornography, but they can be turned off. And there's good reason for turning them off. Computer filters being what they are, they could block access to online medical information --- information about breast cancer or testicular cancer, for example.

And, notes Kent Oliver, who chairs the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, the same filter may let pornographic sites through with no problem. The pornographic web site whitehouse.com has snagged many a user looking for the official whitehouse.gov site, says Oliver.

The federal Children's Internet Protection Act requires libraries to have those filters. But as a result of a court case filed by the American Library Association, librarians may turn off those filters if patrons older than 17 ask them to.

The downtown library's policy is to do just that. "If you're going to have filters," says Oliver, "then what they're doing is ideal."

I'm no fan of pornography. I certainly don't think children should be exposed to it. I don't want it shoved in my face or anybody else's. But people have a constitutional right to read or see pornography if they want to.

Nor should librarians become our culture police, wandering up and down the aisles checking on what we're reading or viewing.

And we shouldn't make it harder --- and more embarrassing --- for people to get access to sensitive medical information. (Keep in mind that the downtown library serves a wide variety of people --- including many who can't afford their own computers.)

Clearly, the downtown library needs to review its practices --- as opposed to its policy. The Monroe County Public Library director, Paula Smith, was out of town last week and wasn't available for comment, but a City Hall spokesperson told us that all of the downtown library's computers have filters that block the computers on the first and second floors. That's where the children's and teen areas are located.

The Channel 10 report says that the man looking at boylovesites.com was at a computer on the second floor.

But this kind of thing can be fixed without trampling on the First Amendment.

And it can be fixed without grandstanding. And without beating up publicly on library staff.

Brooks would have scored a lot more points with me if she had picked up the phone and called the director of the library after the Channel 10 piece. I'd have thought more of her as a public servant if she had expressed her concern and asked if she couldn't sit down with the director and discuss the situation.

Maybe she did exactly that. Brooks doesn't return a lot of phone calls from this newspaper. But we do know that she sent out a press release threatening to cut off millions of dollars of county funds from the library if it didn't shape up. With that, the media were off and running.

The D&C's headline --- "Library porn policy stuns exec" --- lacked only the exclamation mark.

"The county executive saw an immediate threat to our children," county communications director John Durso told our reporter, Jeremy Moule. "She believed it was important to let the library board know how she felt and why it was important that they take immediate action."

Uh huh. And the library board couldn't have gotten the message unless the story made front-page headlines, with the county executive as the Protector of Our Children.

Thanks to Jeremy Moule for research for this column.