Library Meeting Rooms

[writerkit]

I'm all for library science getting better on social justice-- and Library Journal has already been known to miss reading the room; they gave a design award to the Hunters Point Library, after all, and my very first reaction looking at the pictures of the book terraces was "But that's inaccessible; how did they get away with that?" (The answer being "they didn't"; they have in fact been sued for the design of the library.)

But the uproar over the Seattle Public Library having allowed an anti-trans group to host an event there and subsequently getting library of the year... we are *government agencies*. Libraries are *government agencies*. We can't, *legally*, impose restrictions on speech that are other than time-and-place-and-manner. We talk about Twitter and Facebook not having to uphold the First Amendment because they're not governments. Well guess what a library is? A government. That means that we can't make choices based on ideology. If a group wants to come along and rent a meeting room, and we deny it because we dislike their politics, THEY WILL WIN when they sue. Unless we have some reason to think they're using the meeting room to do something actually illegal, we don't have a choice.

Your choices here are stop renting meeting rooms to outside groups altogether, or change the First Amendment.

Now, should Seattle Public Library have actually *said* "the library is not sponsoring this event but legally does not have a choice because otherwise we're a government agency restricting speech" instead of going "Intellectual freedom" which as a buzzword has been used to cover up so much of library science's racist BS? Yes, probably, and the fact that they didn't does make me a little suspicious of their motives. But that's not the argument people are making, and whether or not *they* were thinking about the "government-restricts-speech" aspect of this does not make it less true. (Then again, I suspect many of the people making this argument will respond "Who cares if you get sued; it is important to disobey an unjust law", and then we're back to my usual "Do you REALLY want the government to have the power to decide what speech is okay? Because that's going to be turned against the marginalized first" argument which I have far more often than really makes me comfortable with some of the would-be revolutionaries I know.)

Comments

[elusiveat]

Yes.

This is literally a textbook case. Like, in my high school American Government class, they gave us a scenario worksheet where we were supposed to imagine ourselves as the managers of a library and decide which of a list of groups we should allow to use the library as meeting space. And the gotcha was exactly what you say, that no, the library staff don't get to pick and choose.

[writerkit]

And yet, so many *librarians* are joining in the uproar here and seeing it as more of the upper echelons' bigotry. (And don't get me wrong, the upper echelons of library science have a *lot* of bigotry. It's just this isn't one of those times.)

Have you noticed there's an increasing view in the activist community of "I have no problem with governmentally restricting speech as long as it's the speech I want restricted"?

[elusiveat]

I haven't observed a clear trajectory on free speech per se, but I definitely feel a personal disconnect from a lot of members of my social circle, and I think there is a stronger tendency toward group-think than there used to be, which probably makes people feel more justified in taking a selective-free-speech stance.

Just now I looked around to see if I could find a copy of the scenario exercise that I did in high school, and instead I found this, which I guess is exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2020/05/01/neutrality-when-speech-isnt-free/

I don't like it at all.

[elusiveat]

By the way, if you know where I could find a copy of that exercise, that would be helpful!

[elusiveat]

Thirdly, a while back I heard a really great interview with former ACLU President Nadine Strossen about here book "Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship." Have you seen it? If not, might be of interest:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36722212-hate

[writerkit]

Yeah, that stuff. There's something getting passed around called "The Paradox of Tolerance" that has gained a lot of currency lately, which basically posits that if you allow hate speech to exist it eventually drowns out all other speech and destroys society, therefore societies that truly tolerate *all* speech are inevitably doomed to fall to fascism. I have... a lot of issues with that logic, but if you argue against it these days then you are a Nazi Shill and Part Of The Problem and No Longer Welcome In Our Community. People praise Europe's speech laws but they miss things like this: https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-laws-are-often-used-to-suppress-and-punish-left-wing-viewpoints/