On the question of public morality, recent events only confirm what’s already been proven: The Left rejects the idea that the public square necessitates public morals. From our city streets to the White House and all the way down to our smallest institutions, moral relativism is prevalent. 

On Thursday, Alexander Hughes wrote about a recent bill signed into law in Illinois banning libraries from regulating the literary content on their shelves. His post does an excellent job of explaining in practical terms why such restrictions are necessary. As he puts it: 

The ALA might want libraries to include “all points of view on current and historical issues,” but if your local library attempted to represent the fullness of Flat Earth theory — or provide information on each of the new genders and sexual orientations in which we are now supposed to believe — at the expense of more fruitful areas of thought, it would be doing your community a great disservice.

Alexander also cites Russell Kirk, who himself was deeply concerned with moral relativism in the literary sphere. In Kirk’s essay “The Moral Imagination,” he discusses the effect that literature has on the normative values of a person and of society. Kirk argues that the impact that literature can have on corrupting a person’s values is deep. He posits this: 

The person who reads bad books instead of good may be subtly corrupted; the person who reads nothing at all maybe forever adrift in life unless he lives in a community still powerfully influenced by what Gustave Thibon calls “moral habits” and by oral tradition.

Kirk also reminds us that education is meant to convey universal truths that the community must hold. From his essay “The Necessity of Dogma in Public Schooling”:

Yet all successful schooling depends upon the acceptance of necessary dogmas. We teach, or used to teach, in kindergarten the dogma that it is wrong for one child to kick another in the shins—and that if the aggressor persists in his value-preference, punishment will follow. Dogmas are first principles. Without first principles, nothing can be achieved intellectually or morally, even by the most brilliant teachers.

These principles of education and literature carry over to public libraries. As the community depository of literary wisdom, public libraries definitionally convey public moral standards. To suggest, as Illinois has done, that the community has no right to set such standards is to suggest that there is no standard at all. 

This is preposterous. Not only should these libraries be permitted to select which books they have on their shelves for the practical reasons that Alexander laid out, but it is right and good for them to do so on moral grounds. These libraries are places for the public to learn and think. The moral standards of the bookshelves the libraries contain are both instructive to and reflective of the public. It is just for these communities to designate a moral standard by selecting which books to make available, because that is the very purpose of the library itself: to house communal wisdom and virtue for future generations to draw upon. To muddy that wisdom by setting all books as equal is to degrade the moral fabric of the community that the library serves.