[xyzzyz]

I do not believe there is any sort of “ring fence” between schools and politics. The entire point of public school boards and elections thereto is to enable voters to exercise the political control over the branch of government that is providing public educational service. If your argument indeed is that the public schools should be fully and wholly independently ran by nonelected bureaucrats entirely as they please, with no input from voters whatsoever, while being publicly funded, then well, let me just say that I am adamantly opposed to that, and so is most everyone else. You cannot just claim that “we ring fence schools from politics” and expect people to acquiesce to relinquishing control of the public service they fund and make use of.

[JumpCrisscross]

> point of public school boards and elections thereto is to enable voters to exercise the political control over the branch of government that is providing public education

Fair enough. Perhaps the answer is school libraries are Constitutionally problematic–we can call them book bazaars and acknowledge that minors under state custody do not have the right to a library.

Politicians removing books from libraries is a clear boundary. These aren't books being put in front of students as part of their curriculum. They aren't even in classrooms. They're in a library, and when we normalize plucking books from school libraries we normalize doing that at public libraries, where there are also nutters levying the same arguments to get books pulled.

[xyzzyz]

I don’t think that non-school public (ie. government-ran) libraries here are any different from legal perspective: since I am funding my local public library, and since the library has a limited budget, I expect to have a say as a voter as to what books I want it to stock and take space on shelves. For example, I am very much opposed to it stocking books in foreign languages, because few people even can read these, and so I don’t consider it an effective use of public resources. This is no different than, say, having a say (through elected representatives) in where I want public infrastructure resources to be spent on. Point is, voters have every right to direct the government to buy or throw away any books from public libraries as they please.

Having the legal argument out of the way, I think that there is very little interest in political action directed to remove books from non-school public libraries. People who can get their books from there, can also just buy them on Amazon, and these certainly are not and will not be banned by any sort of government in the United States. Thus, it would be pointless and ineffectual to exercise political power here.

In any case, it is extremely hard for me to not be angry at activists, who, through language games, are trying to confuse people into supporting their goal, which is to force the people to buy and make easily available to children certain books that the people very much do not want to buy and make easily available to children.

[JumpCrisscross]

> since I am funding my local public library, and since the library has a limited budget, I expect to have a say as a voter as to what books I want it to stock

Then, put simply, it's not a library. It's a store of books. Libraries have deeper historic, political and legal significance than books the majority wants around. (You can call it whatever you want. But it shouldn't receive federal funding nor the legal protections we extend to libraries.)

> there is very little interest in political action directed to remove books from non-school public libraries

It's a prominent and increasing trend [1].

[1] https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-...

[xyzzyz]

> Libraries have deeper historic, political and legal significance than books the majority wants around.

If a public library doesn’t do what the majority of people want, why should they keep it around? In our political system, the people are the sovereign, and they have the ultimate right to decide how they want their government to operate, limited by constitution and other law. Public libraries don’t have a right to independently exist as some sort of feudal benefice, with right to extort the local peasants attached to it. Their existence and operations stem solely from the will of the people, and they will it to work differently or not at all, so shall it be.

> It's a prominent and increasing trend

As far as I can tell, the article linked is overwhelmingly talking about school libraries. Have you read it? I hope you haven’t, otherwise it would be rather dishonest of you to give it as evidence to support the point about non-school libraries.

[pokerface_86]

what exactly bothers you so much about kids reading slightly more mature books exactly? it’s not like 50 shades of grey and 20 copies of A Birth of a Nation are sitting around in school libraries and plenty of kids read well above their age level.

It sounds like you just want to control things