Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker signed a bill Monday that would require libraries receiving funding from the state to adopt an anti-censorship pledge akin to that promoted by the American Library Association (ALA). The bill will take effect on New Year’s Day next year.
The ALA’s “Library Bill of Rights” includes a number of provisions governing how libraries are to manage access to their collections, but perhaps the most significant are the prohibitions on excluding books according to the views of their authors or the ideas they contain, as well as a general commitment to “challenge censorship.”
I sympathize with the impulse behind the bill, and conservatives might even be able to use it to our advantage. Somehow, I suspect that if the Illinois State Library starts trying to censor books according to their ideological content, it will be more likely to purge The Conservative Mind than Heather Has Two Mommies.
But the principle behind the bill is flawed. Daniel Buck has already done an excellent job explaining why it is “totally appropriate for schools to decide what books students read.” You can read his piece here at National Review. His explanation of the importance of properly shaping young minds applies beyond the schoolhouse. The ALA’s guidelines state that a person’s use of a library “should not be denied or abridged” on account of age. I hope that Illinois librarians will have the presence of mind not to follow this standard when it comes to allowing four-year-olds access to Fifty Shades of Grey, but I am not confident that activist judges will permit them to do so.
Going further, we are freer now than ever from relying on local newspapers, bookstores, and libraries for information. If you can’t find something in hard copy near you, you can almost certainly find it online. But libraries do not have the luxury of maintaining collections of near-infinite size. Nor do they have unlimited financial resources with which to fill their shelves, forcing librarians — and the local governments that oversee them — to make decisions on which books are worth reading.
The ALA might want libraries to include “all points of view on current and historical issues,” but if your local library attempted to represent the fullness of Flat Earth theory — or provide information on each of the new genders and sexual orientations in which we are now supposed to believe — at the expense of more fruitful areas of thought, it would be doing your community a great disservice.
The right of private actors to speak freely must be preserved, but communities are allowed to decide that some ideas are not worthy of public support, even if conservatives are afraid that the Left will use this power against us. As Russell Kirk put it, “the attempt to sustain a society without dogmata is as vain as the attempt to make bricks without straw.” Even as I would encourage libraries to build reasonably intellectually diverse collections, it is not a restriction on your freedom of speech not to have your particular ideology represented there.