Subject: IWG PlanetWeb letters
From: Interfaith Working Group <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 23:33:26 -0400 (EDT)

July 14, 1997

Ken Soohoo
Founder and Vice President of Engineering
PlanetWeb, Inc.,
1390 Villa Street
Mountain View, CA 94041

Dear Mr.  Soohoo:

We are disturbed to learn that PlanetWeb's browser has
filtering options which focus on sexual minorities,
even though the most recent version has eliminated
phrases such as "recruiting" and "alternative
lifestyles" and has added filters to prevent access to
sites with a negative attitude toward sexual minorities
as well.  We doubt that PlanetWeb, as a provider of
general-use software, is trying to gain a reputation as
an advocate of social stereotyping, but to single out
one minority group is to ignore the reality that sexual
minorities are just as diverse a group as any other,
and implies that sexual orientation is more important
than other human factors such as skin color or
religion.  

We are also curious about how you will classify a
site's content in regard to sexual minorities.  We are
particularly interested in your plans for dealing with
sites addressing sexual orientation from a religious
perspective. We invite you to visit our web page:
http://www.libertynet.org/~iwg/ for an example of such
a site.  This page also has a collection of links to
other sites whose classification you might find
extremely problematic.

We sincerely hope that you will reconsider such a
biased classification policy.  

Sincerely,
Barbara Purdom     Christopher Purdom
Interfaith Working Group Coordinators

July 14, 1997

Bernard Stolar
Chief Operating Officer
Sega of America
255 Shoreline Drive
Suite 200
Redwood City, CA 94065

Dear Mr.  Stolar:

We are disturbed to learn that PlanetWeb's browser has
filtering options which focus on sexual minorities,
even though the most recent version has eliminated
phrases such as "recruiting" and "alternative
lifestyles" and has added filters to prevent access to
sites with a negative attitude toward sexual minorities
as well.  We doubt that Sega, as a provider of general-
use software, is trying to gain a reputation as an
advocate of social stereotyping, but to single out one
minority group is to ignore the reality that sexual
minorities are just as diverse a group as any other,
and implies that sexual orientation is more important
than other human factors such as skin color or
religion.  

We sincerely hope that you will reconsider such a
biased classification policy.  

Sincerely,
Barbara Purdom     Christopher Purdom
Interfaith Working Group Coordinators

-- 

Interfaith Working Group                Religious organizations, congregations
[email-masked]                      and clergy supporting gay rights,
http://www.libertynet.org/~iwg/         reproductive freedom, and the 
215-235-3050                            separation of church and state.