PLATFORM : How Open a Forum?
David McCalden argued that the Holocaust never happened. The California Library Assn. thought that it was perfectly all right to give McCalden a forum for his fantasies. That’s the problem.
Do responsible organizations have an obligation to provide such a forum? Not unless their policy is to allow any and all views on any subject to be presented under their auspices. Would the California Library Assn. permit someone to speak at its conference on the “fact” that gravity does not exist, or that the Civil War was an invention of Union apologists and never really took place?
Why, then, allow someone who denies the reality of the Holocaust to use the library association and its credibility to disseminate such hateful fabrications?
Setting standards does not mean censorship. What are the library association’s standards? That is the question.
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