As with so many censorware products, X-Stop takes a special interest in gays and lesbians. We could write as much on this topic as all others combined, but we'll just list a few examples of the bias.

The Gay Pastor:

"I am a ordained Pastor with the mission to give Counseling to all gays with regard to our personal adaptation to our new found lifestyle. Not that this is any new lifestyle at all. Gays has always been and will always be. Let us now act towards a universal goal and that is to educate each other and to relief some of the pains in becoming a responsible grown-up with perspective in live."

Queer Korner Productions, which sells controversial and offensive items such as coffee mugs, T-shirts and bumper stickers. Their webmaster, when asked whether anything on the site is unsuitable for children, writes:

No, we simply offer general retail merchandise, nothing of an adult nature.

Monika's Home Page. She's working on her doctoral degree, she lives with Iggi the Attack Cat, and oh yes, she's in love with another woman. Discrimination is a fact of life, and censorware is no exception.

womentowomen.net. We're not sure how to classify this one. The website at http://www.womentowomen.net/ is the home of "Wacky Freeware" - mostly Shockwave games to play on your web browser. Except in the case of the Xena Warrior Princess shockgame game, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the domain name, so they probably have another domain name we're not aware of.

We think X-Stop probably meant to ban womentowomen.com instead - a totally different website, on alternative health care for women. That website talks about Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which includes the word "breast," so it's not hard to see why X-Stop might think it was filthy pornography.

Jeff's Big Ole Gay Website mostly would be PG-13 rated. Unless you have a problem with pictures of men hugging and kissing each other, of course.

Movie Bear Cinema, which offers the opportunity for "bears" (large gay men) to get together to watch videos in a pleasant, comfortable environment. Recent offerings include such X-rated fare as "Jurassic Park," and the next offering is "Titanic."

JerZBear's Homepage. A computer professional in New Jersey, into CDs, collecting animation cels, and tattoos. Non-sexual pictures of his tattoos and so forth. But, he's a gay man, so his entire site is blocked.

Josh Simon's Home Page. A computer professional in the Chicago area, his website has information about stamp collecting, music, cooking ... and some gay stories he's written. X-Stop blocks his entire site instead of just the stories (which are all in a separate directory).

Gay Arab has material and links for gay Arabs - health information, news, etc. There is some male nudity, but of course X-Stop blocks the entire site instead of the nudity (which is all in a separate directory).

The same concept, blocking an entire gay site because of limited and separated content which may be objectionable, can be said for the blocks on each of the following sites: GayGlobal; Gay Los Angeles; Gay Nation and many others.

It's sickening that ordinary webpages become the equivalent of hardcore pornography in someone's mind, just because they happen to be related to homosexuality in some way. It's even more sickening that a company can codify its prejudice, market it in the guise of keeping our children safe ... and that our schools and libraries will buy it.

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