Error: Hell Not Found

The Depths of Hell take on the Depths of Hell. Who will win? Precisely.

Since its inception, the United States of America has allegedly been a nation built on its Constitution and Bill of Rights. I was told once by a man on TV that these documents are unique in that they allow American citizens to say and think whatever it is that they so desire. It is often assumed that these Constitutional rights cannot be denied to any American, but every once in a while, the Orwellian thought police show up and attempt to do just that. When this happens, it not only hurts the people whose rights have been denied, but stains the American way of life as well. Unfortunately, such a situation may be occurring right here on the campus of the University of Oregon.

At the beginning of the summer term, when there were very few students around to notice, one Joe St Sauver, Assistant Director of the University Computing Center, deleted from the UO news spool (the selected newsgroups carried by the UO server) several USENET newsgroups pertaining to certain non-mainstream religious practices. (For those readers who are unfamiliar with the Internet, and with USENET in particular, a newsgroup is an online forum in which people can exchange ideas and information by posting messages.) The newsgroups which were eliminated included alt.satanism, alt.pagan, alt.slack (the Sub-Genius religion) and the entire alt.magick hierarchy.

Alternative they may be, but these are religions, adhered to and studied by people all over the globe. By eliminating these newsgroups, the UO Computing Center and its assistant director-cum-news administrator Joe St Sauver - who, for the record, refused to return the Commentator's phone calls - opened themselves up to allegations of having violated, among other laws, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of our Constitution, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. " The Supreme Court has, in recent decades, consistently interpreted the Establishment Clause to cover all government institutions, including public schools and universities. Under the First Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a public institution may provide resources for the study of all religions, or of none, but may not treat different religions inequitably. Aggrieved students allege that St Sauver has engaged in such inequitable treatment, citing, among other points of evidence, that St Sauver eliminated only the newsgroups of unpopular religions, while keeping at least 79 Christian newsgroups on the server. When the newsgroups were removed, the University students who traffic on them at first believed their inability to access them to be a technical glitch. Among these students were Anthropology major Craig Hunt and Psychology major Kerry Delf. The censored newsgroups had been an integral part of their studies; by using these forums they were able to communicate with members of the covered religions, and with other users with an interest in these subjects. With St Sauver's elimination of the newsgroups, he restricted UO students' ability to conduct research and communicate about such topics, whether or not they are members of those religions. After several weeks, the missing newsgroups had not resurfaced, and St Sauver had utterly failed to respond to early e-mailed queries regarding the groups' disappearance, so on July 31st Hunt paid a visit in person to St Sauver's office. According to Hunt, he told St Sauver that he was experiencing difficulty picking up the several newsgroups, and asked the news admin to explain the reason for the groups' disappearance. St Sauver replied with statements to the effect that the University was really better off without such newsgroups. Hunt repeated his query: what was the technical problem causing his and other students' inability to access the newsgroups in question? St Sauver's response: that if Hunt wanted to have access to newsgroups about magick and Satanism, he should pay for an account with a private Internet Service Provider, and use their news server. Asked again, he pointed to the high ranking of one of the University's servers on the "Freenix Review, " which he described as "a ranking of worldwide news sites. Asked yet again why the newsgroups were missing, St Sauver finally produced something resembling a relevant explanation: he modified his previous answer to state that newsgroups must fit into a proper hierarchy, such as alt.religion.satanism, and that this was the reason that alt.magick, the other alt.magick.* newsgroups, and alt.pagan were gone, and alt.satanism's news feed had been blocked (alt.satanism has since been removed entirely from the UO server). He went on to state that newsgroups must have academic value, implying that he believed the deleted newsgroups to have no such value.

In the e-mail correspondence following Hunt and St Sauver's face-to-face meeting, Hunt pointed out certain major flaws in the reasons that had eventually been given for the newsgroups' deletion, criticisms which the Computing Center administration has been utterly unable or unwilling to refute. After their conversation on July 31, Hunt e-mailed St Sauver. "[A]fter a brief glance at other available newsgroups, I note the Christian newsgroup, alt.christnet, does not maintain a 'religion' label, and yet its archives are maintained on gladstone. Why the apparent double standard? " In his reply the same day, St Sauver evaded the question, stating, "No double standard. We have plenty of pro-religious newsgroups, plenty of anti-religious newsgroups, and plenty of alternative-religion newsgroups. For example, you mentioned the alt.christnet newsgroups, which are an example of pro-religious groups; you can see alt.atheism or alt.recovery.religion for examples of fairly blatantly anti-religious groups; and alt.religion.wicca and talk.religion.pantheism are examples of alternative religious groups. " Hunt easily recognized the evasion, and in his Aug.1 response wrote, "Again, go back and reread what I just said. I made no argument about what religious and/or anti-religious newsgroups are listed as available. I said that alt.christnet, a Christian religious newsgroup, is not being held to the same standard you have set for alt.satanism: it maintains no 'religion' category in its title (as you've insisted that alt.satanism should), yet it continues to function perfectly from the newsreader. Why? " St Sauver never responded. The newsgroup alt.christnet and its subhierarchy remain active on the UO server, while alt.satanism continues to be censored. Referring to Hunt's request that alt.magick and its subhierarchy be reinstated, St Sauver stated in a July 31 e-mail, "Locally, we carry alt.magic and alt.magic.secrets rather than alt.magick (with a k), as well as a number of groups about the trading cards game 'Magic [The Gathering].' " Although Hunt had already clearly explained the difference between magic, "Magic, " and magick in their meeting earlier that day, he tried again in his e-mailed response. "'Magic' and 'Magick' are not the same thing. 'Magic' is an act of sleight-of-hand, illusion, or entertaining trickery. 'Magick' is a form of Western ceremonialism; it is a spiritual practice somewhat akin to witchcraft. It is not a misspelling, nor is it related in any way to 'magic;' " he added in an Aug.1 e-mail that "[n]either...are related to the trading card game 'Magic.' " St Sauver followed up his spoken comments on academic value with the claim that any student desiring the return of the censored newsgroups must provide proof of a specific assignment requiring the use of the groups. Statements include, "If you have a programmatic requirement…[which explicitly requires] access to those groups, please let me know what instructor is supervising that work and I'll be glad to discuss that requirement with them, " to Craig Hunt on July 31; and "What is at issue…is the extent to which the request you've made for certain newsgroups is substantively and materially related to your graduate work, " to Folklore graduate student and newsgroup user Dave Faux on Aug. 10. Hunt responded to these demands in part on Aug. 1, saying, "I'm not aware of any University policy that states I must be enrolled in an active program related to the topic in order to have access to resource material. Tell me; if department sponsorship is now the requirement for newsgroup access, then where is this University's Department of Zoophilia Studies, which justifies your retention of access to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality? " Faux responded separately in a similar fashion. St Sauver even suggested to Hunt (in a July 31 e-mail) that, if he so strongly desired the newsgroups' reinstatement, he should found a "Department of Satanic Studies " at the Universities. This particular attempted justification for the removal of the alternative religion newsgroups has been especially baffling for many people. This confusion can be attributed to the UO server's continued propagation of thousands of groups with little or no academic value -- from alt.tv.hermans-head to japan.fishing.lure to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.fetish.wet-and-messy to alt.sex.fetish.amputee -- and to the fact that even more academically irrelevant newsgroups, such as alt.fan.danii-minogue, have been added since these shenanigans began. As Folklore grad student Dave Faux pointed out to St Sauver during their e-mail exchange, "[I]t seems odd that the presence of any alt.sex.* newsgroup would have an unquestioned position on the UO server, but so much trouble is being taken over these more wholesome ones. " In fact, it is those very alt.sex.* and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* (read: porn) groups which provide such a convenient and obvious refutation of one of St Sauver's other strange claims about his USENET censorship: that he had to delete the small religious newsgroups in question because of bandwidth and disk space issues. Again for those readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Internet, "bandwidth " refers, essentially, to the amount of information carried over an ISP's feed. Throughout his correspondence with various interested individuals, he alluded to disk space and bandwidth concerns as being a reason for the newsgroups' removal; this has now apparently become the official party line, as a Sep.11 Register-Guard article on this case noted that "University officials...insisted that the decision to remove the newsgroups had everything to do with computer capacity and nothing to do with content [emphasis added]. " This explanation, however, utterly fails to account for the discrepancy found in the fact that St Sauver has removed (and has refused to reinstate) a small number of text (written material) religious newsgroups, yet continues to maintain 152 alt.sex.binaries.pictures.erotica.* newsgroups, 83 alt.sex.* (some text, some binaries) groups, and an uncounted number of other sex-oriented binaries newsgroups, despite the fact that binaries (pictures) newsgroups use far more bandwidth than virtually any text-only newsgroups. Kerry Delf, Hunt's co-grievant in this case, said, "I have nothing against sex on the Internet; as a civil libertarian, I strongly support free speech on-line as well as elsewhere, and that includes sexual material. However, it seems mighty suspicious to me that this man says he won't reinstate a few small newsgroups because of disk space and bandwidth issues, while with his left hand he continues to support vast numbers of bandwidth-gobbling binaries groups. Were this really a bandwidth issue, the pornographic binaries newsgroups would have been the first to go. " After it became evident that their letter writing campaign was not going to achieve results, Delf and Hunt finally decided in August to file a grievance with the Office of Affirmative Action. "It certainly wasn't our first choice as to how to handle this, but it has turned out to be the only apparent way to achieve results, " said Delf. "We only hope that the decision regarding our formal grievance is just; if it fails to remedy the situation to our satisfaction, we're in for a protracted battle in the courts. And no one looks forward to that. " A decision from the committee handling this grievance should be forthcoming this week. To date, St Sauver has never been clear about his true motivation for removing the newsgroups, citing such varied reasons as bandwidth, hierarchical structure, the spelling of "magick " not being in his dictionary, his apparent belief that Satanism and magick are hobbies with no academic value, and, well, the simple - and chilling - "we're just better off without them. " And this inconsistency continues: recently the Computing Center released a response to Delf and Hunt's OAA grievance. This document suggested that the whole outcry was for naught, as "for the duration of the period mentioned in the complaint and at this time, the groups which the complainants claim are being censored were in fact available from one of the computing center's other news servers, neonlights.uoregon.edu, and this server was and is available to the complainant(s). " Said complainants maintain that they have followed up on this claim, and that they have never been able to access the groups - on any UO news server - since the newsgroups' deletion in June. At 10:05 pm, October 13, this reporter logged onto neonlights.uoregon.edu and sugar.uoregon.edu, as per the instructions of Student Network Engineer Selena Brewington, and the Newsgroups in question could not be accessed. However, on October 14 this reporter once again logged on, and the newsgroups were very much alive on the server.

This, ladies and gentleman, is shady, suspect, and yes, downright shifty. The status of the newsgroups, as with the attempted justifications, is as shifting as the sand: what he states as the reason for the newsgroups' removal on one day, he ignores the net; what he now claims have always been access alternatives, he explicitly denied existed - because, despite the Computing Center's current claims, they apparently did not exist - until very recently. As one Jim Ruiz, who exchanged several e-mails with St Sauver regarding his censorship of USENET, pointed out in an (as yet unprinted) letter to the ODE Editor, "I have no knowledge of what the University's policies might be in this regard; and frankly it's none of my concern. I know only that St Sauver's treatment of these students was inappropriate, and the story that I see the University telling now is inconsistent with the one 'they,' in the person of St Sauver, told as this situation developed. "

This entire unpleasantness is a festering mess. Who is in the right is completely and thoroughly muddled; the question's resolution is difficult for anyone even remotely sane. Did Joe St Sauver eliminate these newsgroups for reasons not entirely professional? God only knows. If he deleted them for a legitimate reason, then he should be exonerated. Though it has been invoked in this case primarily as grounds for the newsgroups' reinstatement, our U.S. Constitution protects people like St Sauver as well: one cannot be arrested, find, nor imprisoned for lacking people skills, or for merely being an ass. However, if he and the Computing Center have violated the First Amendment of our Constitution, then they must face the consequences of their actions. Why they have chosen to open themselves up to such charges, by refusing to reinstate the religious newsgroups once they realized that students took issue with their deletion, is an interesting question; the answer is elusive and enigmatic. "It would take seconds to put them back, " Hunt says with a shrug, "and instead, he's going to end up risking his career. To him this is a worthwhile endeavor; this is the hill he wants to die on.

This whole situation has the destructive potential to explode in the face of all those involved - so stay tuned, loyal readers, and don't change that channel.

Chris Aster is a writer. Go Cubs!