Ignore the racy headline because you will believe, after all the other losses the West has suffered these last few years on the liberty front, what happened to a head librarian after she encouraged libraries to stock lots of books with various viewpoints.
Cathy Simpson is, or rather was, head librarian at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library on the Canadian side of the river, so at least it didn’t happen here. Not that it can’t happen here, as Sinclair Lewis and I will never tire of reminding you.
Back in February, Simpson wrote a charming op-ep — at least to my eyes — for Niagara Now headlined, “Censorship and what we are allowed to read.”
Before we go any further, I know nothing of Simpson’s politics. For all I know, she has a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” in one hand and an illegal-in-Canada firearm in the other. Or maybe she wants to seize the means of production and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. All I know, or even care about, is her personal and professional support for “Freedom to Read Week’s principles of intellectual freedom, freedom of expression, freedom to read and resistance to censorship.”
Yeah, she doesn’t sound very “dictatorship of the proletariat” to me, either.
But back to Simpson’s op-ed, where she explains that she “began talking with librarians who believe in library neutrality and pluralism a year ago and was introduced to an organization called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).”
I don’t think I’d heard of FAIR before but it’s an American organization that has opened chapters in Canada, including one for libraries like Simpson’s. Er, like the library Simpson used to have. According to her, FAIR supports:
- Civil rights and liberties guaranteed to each individual, including freedom of speech and expression, equal protection under the law, and the right to personal privacy.
- Defence of individuals threatened or persecuted for speech, or those held to a different set of rules for language or conduct based on their skin colour, ancestry or other immutable characteristics.
- Respectful disagreement because bad ideas are best confronted with good ideas and never with dehumanization, deplatforming or blacklisting.
- Objective truth that it is discoverable and scientific research untainted by political agenda.
- Pro-human and compassionate opposition to intolerance and racism rooted in dignity and our common humanity.
There’s a 99% certainty that any of the progressives FAIR hadn’t already lost with its stand against dehumanization, deplatforming or blacklisting, raced for the hills at “objective reality.”
So when Simspon went on to ask her “colleagues to recognize their biases and recommit to striving for library neutrality and viewpoint diversity in collections,” they fired her.
They fired her for “asking all writers, publishers, library workers, teachers and readers to acknowledge that pressure to suppress the availability of books can come from across the political spectrum” during Canada’s Freedom to Read Week.
Daryl Novak, chair of the library board, said she was fired for the “politicized” promotion of FAIR and for using her job title on her Niagra Now byline. “Our rights to free speech get curtailed somewhat when we associate ourselves with an organization.”
Curious, no, that it’s considered “politicized” when a librarian suggests that libraries shouldn’t be politicized.
Mostly though, Simpson was asking — as a librarian — that her brother and sister librarians recognize their duty not to act as censors for one side. Her job title… her former job title… was the most powerful weapon in her rhetorical arsenal.
I’m sure Novak knows that. I’m also sure that’s why he and his board took it away.
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