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Comment by scottious | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what the problem is here? If I open a book store I'm sure as hell not going to sell Mien Kampf or white supremacist manifestos. Am I being unreasonable by standing by my values and not stocking these books? I don't think they should be banned but I also don't think I should be required to sell them.

I'm sure there are plenty of Christian book stores / libraries out there who are unwilling to stock The God Delusion. And why would a LGBTQ bookstore sell LGBTQ hate propaganda?

I guess this could be taken to an extreme. Maybe a library in a highly conservative town chooses to not stock anything that has a hint of left-wing ideology, and maybe they have internet filters to block any left-wing web sites, and they only put front-and-center highly right-wing books.

I don't know, it's complicated.

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Why would a christian bakery sell gay wedding cakes?

The truth is, there is already plenty interference is private business, but it (seems) to not be evenly applied. If I request a library stock (or borrow) a book that I'd like to read, I don't consider political aesthetics to be a valid reason to refuse.

> I'm sure there are plenty of Christian book stores / libraries out there who are unwilling to stock The God Delusion

Do you mean a normal bookstore owned by Christians, or a specialist bookstore that only stocks christian literature? If the store could refuse any non-christian material (e.g. a cookbook) as well as Dawkins books, I'm not sure if that's censorship - a greengrocer can also refuse to stock The God Delusion on similarly reasonable grounds.

> Why would a christian bakery sell gay wedding cakes?

I think we've decided as a society that sexual orientation is a protected group. You cannot discriminate based on sexual orientation. But I think you can still discriminate based on views of what is racist and what is not? If a white guy walks into black-owned barber shop and throws around racial slurs at the barbers, can the owners of that barber shop refuse him service and kick him out? I certainly hope so... but am I being hypocritical?

Honestly I'm out of my depth here. I have opinions but I don't think my opinions are necessarily as informed as I want them to be.

> If a white guy walks into black-owned barber shop..

What kind of example is this? Does it matter what the respective races are? How is this equivalent to the wedding-cake example?

As for "sexual orientation is a protected group"; religion is also protected.

This specific thread is about public libraries. I definitely don’t want public librarians to see their job as an avenue for expressing their views.

But for the rest of it, I get what you’re saying. I definitely want to live in a world where there are Christian booksellers selling their curated collections, and left wing revolutionary bookstores selling theirs. That only adds to diversity of expression. On the other hand, if I started to see large numbers of previously neutral purveyors of books saying they wouldn’t carry anything that offends the church I’d criticize that. I don’t want to live under a new puritanism, even if everybody forwarding it is entirely within their rights to do so.

> I definitely don’t want public librarians to see their job as an avenue for expressing their views.

Doesn't the fact that there are more books in existence than any library can possibly stock forces them to pick and choose what gets onto shelves? That filter process cannot be divorced from people's values and baises unless we went with some sort of random selection of all texts that have ever existed, which would result in complete nonsense. We pick winners and losers all the time and not everybody is going to agree with those choices.

I guess I don't see it as unreasonable for a library to not want to stock what they view as racially insensitive books, especially kids books. But of course, people are going to disagree with exactly what that means. Maybe somebody out there truly thinks Green Eggs & Ham shouldn't be stocked because it glorifies exploiting animals for their meat and eggs. There's just no pleasing everybody I guess

>> “ Maybe somebody out there truly thinks Green Eggs & Ham shouldn't be stocked because it glorifies exploiting animals for their meat and eggs.”

Maybe we’ll get there. In my lifetime censors have been mostly concerned with childrens’ books with supernatural themes and more recently lgbt stories. I’d guess that’s still where most of the library “book banning” is focused.

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