Dear editor:
On the final day of Canadian Library Month, FAIR in Libraries celebrates the critical role libraries play in bringing all viewpoints to their communities.
As a nonpartisan network advancing fairness, understanding and humanity, FAIR in Libraries supports libraries in their mandate to offer a diversity of perspectives in collections, programs and daily operations.
This diversity of perspectives is key to library neutrality, the professional stance that libraries and library workers cannot impose their values and worldviews on users.
Western societies are home to many different cultural, racial, ethnic and faith groups, making neutrality the only ethical position a publicly funded library can adopt.
There are too many community members with their own priorities, values and political causes for the library to endorse any one of them and still hope to provide a welcoming environment for all.
Library neutrality serves as a defence against pressure from across the political spectrum to censor information.
Some within the library profession propose to replace neutrality with social activism or radical empathy but such a change would undermine public trust and lead funders to question supporting libraries that fail to represent the full diversity of interests in their communities.
We applaud library board and staff members who uphold the principles of neutrality, viewpoint diversity, free speech and intellectual freedom.
It takes courage to defend citizens’ rights to access the world’s ideas and information.
This Canadian Library Month, we applaud and celebrate libraries as one of the most important foundations of our liberal democracy.
FAIR in Libraries