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Illinois tilts strongly to the left above I-80, so outside of a few rural western or southern counties, this is an immaterial policy change.
(i have children, and they are free to read whatever material they select from a public library)
You’re inverting the situation. Public libraries are taxpayer funded public services. Being a taxpayer gives you a right to vote on what your tax dollars are used to purchase.
> (i have children, and they are free to read whatever material they select from a public library)
I think this approach does kids a disservice. Kids have undeveloped brains, and lack both knowledge and life experience. What basis do they have for deciding what to read? It’s your job as a parent to curate society’s knowledge to teach them about what’s good and right, and what will help them be healthy and productive citizens.
How do you imagine the state senators who voted for this bill were elected?
You'll see this even in "Red" states. I would go so far as to say that what defines a "red" state is the number of voting districts which are sparsely populated.
Remember the graphic which showed in the 2020 election how the vast majority of the map swung for Trump? As the Democrats are fond of saying, "Land doesn't Vote..."
Ref: https://www.hillcountrynews.com/stories/analysis-in-texas-el... Ref: https://brilliantmaps.com/2020-county-election-map/
Of course... It's always more complicated than this. This is at best the broad strokes, all models are wrong but some are useful...
I think this is actually far less true today than it once was. Yes, Chicago alone makes IL a blue state, but outside Chicago it's not so clear anymore - even north of i80.
It's been rather jarring on my last few visits back home to the West Chicago suburbs. We used to joke about the i80 boundary separating the yokels from regular people. Now I encounter plenty of overt right-wingers without even going south of i88. Just the gun craze alone has converted a lot of people IMO. Concealed carry and little NO PARKING style gun stickers on business entrances everywhere becoming normalized in the state I'm sure has played a role here.
It's a totally different culture of no-flag-too-big and they'll-take-your-guns vs. what I grew up in.
You're right. Who cares if the taxpayers collectively decided that some material was not age-appropriate?
/s
That's the point of using your vote, right? So that some individual employed by the government can't enforce their minority ideology onto the majority population without some sort of blowback.
Isn't doing so a violation of the implied first amendment right to access to information?
Your mistake is expecting consistency from a group that has devolved to seeing hypocrisy as a virtue. It's no longer about lofty ideas and the categorical imperative, but rather fake bravado strong men pushing half-baked agendas to demonstrate naked power.
[0] (being a libertarian I believe there is a strong argument that the tech monopolies constitute de facto government. but that isn't even relevant here)
Otherwise you're not arguing in favor of democracy, you're arguing in favor of your own personal moralizing.
But just think this through.
Imagine how terribly ideological available book selections would become if we had to have “the voting public” decide which books were available. I have a feeling that you would not be happy with the books that the voting majority decides are “acceptable”.
And you act like it’s just the money of the people that don’t want the books that is being used. What about the money of the people that want the books available? Should it be up to you to say the library can’t use those people’s money to buy those books?
Quit acting like this is about the money spent when it is purely about you wanting to foist your morals onto others and using the cost as a scapegoat.
And lastly, it is not, and should not ever be the case that everyone has to agree on every dollar that the government spends. Money is spent on good programs that you as an individual will never directly benefit from. Does that mean that we should allow voters to decide how every dollar is spent? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. So long social security and Medicare and the majority don’t currently use them.
Wait, but both of those are censorship of a form; Apple is just allowed to censor whatever it wants.
Taken to the extreme, should a library be allowed to stock only books that promote the political party of whoever won the latest election?
Obviously decisions for shelf space have to be made. If those decisions for shelf space are made solely by the government's dislike of the material, though, that feels pretty obviously like government censorship to me.
It's crazy how transactional some fundamental American values have become lately.