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Ian Underwood's avatar

That's a clever rhetorical trick, but if a library doesn't carry a book that it doesn't even know about, that's not remotely the same as deliberately choosing not to carry a book that it does know about -- especially if it is known because it was requested by some patrons, or recommended by library professionals, or even offered to the library for free (such as the books, written by me, that one patron offered to the library in Londonderry).

As usual everything comes back to funding. If you're using your own money to stock and operate a library, then you can put whatever materials you want in it. It's an expression of your thoughts about what's worth reading, and what's not.

But as soon as you're taking tax money (which is the case for all the libraries I know about, and which is absolutely the case for school libraries), then you have to take their thoughts into account as well. You can't use tax money to run an indoctrination center, any more than you can take tax money to run a church.

And if the problem is funding, one solution is to stop funding libraries with taxes. Another is to give every taxpayer veto power over what goes into a library that is using his taxes. I think the latter would lead to some interesting situations: Some taxpayers would veto *Gender Queer*, while others would veto the King James Bible. Personally, I'd be curious to see what would remain in a collection curated this way. It might have no materials at all... which would mean no funding would be required. :^D

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Mary Collins's avatar

Librarians are Socialists. They use their position to push their own ideology. The last ALA president admitted it. She was fired and schools dropped their membership.

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