By Selwyn Duke

Sometimes I think claims of "freedom of speech" may be today’s last refuge of a scoundrel. 

Like so many other places, the Lower Macungie Library in Pennsylvania stocks children’s books that seek to normalize perversion.  Certainly at least one book: King & King, which depicts two princes marrying each other and smooching.

Two unsuspecting parents, Jeff and Eileen Issa, learned of the book’s
subject matter the hard way — while reading it to their 2-year-old son —
and are wondering, well, how low Lower Macungie can go. 

The parents complained to the library and asked that the book be
removed from circulation.  Like so many other places, the library
leaned on a predictable defense: Freedom of speech.

As it says in the article:

Kathee Rhode, the library’s director, said censoring books based on
subject matter is the duty of parents, not the library. She said the
library strives to provide material representing a spectrum of views
and ways of life.

‘That’s what a public library does, and you make the choice,’ Rhode
said. ‘We certainly want parents to make that decision for their
children — not one parent making that decision for all children.’

How noble and idealistic.

It’s also nonsense.

The freedom of speech argument may sound good, but the truth is that it
doesn’t hold water.  Would the library stock a children’s book that
openly advocated Nazi ideas or the inferiority of black people?  Or,
would it stock a book that spoke of the sinfulness of homosexual
behavior and the idea that those guilty of it would burn in Hell?  You
get the point.

Like it or not, we will always be drawing a line somewhere.  To say we
must allow anything and everything in a public library in the name of freedom of speech is an untenable position.  And,
as with obscenity, what’s known as "community standards" must prevail.
To say that those whose tax money supports local libraries cannot set
moral boundaries for the works contained therein does violence to the
principles of self-government and local control.

Freedom of speech gives you the right to express any beliefs you wish, but not the right to have them in libraries.  We should remember that these institutions were originally established so that all citizens would have the
opportunity for intellectual enrichment, not to serve as a repository
for whatever effluent is disgorged by the sewer pipe of modern
anti-culture.

If this has been forgotten, we may as well save the tax money and sell the library buildings  to Barnes Ignoble.