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The reason the libraries are woke is not because any government encourages wokeness, but because the kind of person who'd maintain a liberal arts oriented community space is woke. I don't think we should defund religious soup kitchens because the people doing them are religious, and I don't think we should get rid of libraries because the people who show up are on the other team.
(Libraries in particular are less important now because of the internet, but the same thing applies to museums, which still matter a bit)
Oh, I am well aware of why libraries are hotbeds of woke - it's for precisely the same reason that certain fields in universities are (and with substantial cultural and demographic overlap). Although I understand the general comparison to religious soup kitchens here, though, I believe there are actually also severe constraints on how and in what ways religious charities can be overtly religious or proselytize when dealing with public money, aren't there? I have that general sense, and Claude suggests there are indeed extremely strict behavior limits imposed on such charities. And I know the question of, say, if Catholic adoption services could reject gay potential parents has been a culture war flash point previously, for example.
Recognizing the social dynamics of why libraries have been taken over by a very specific, very radicalized niche subculture seems like the start of the conversation when it comes to public funding and public goods, not the end of it, at least to me anyway. It feels very similar to the issue with universities, where the people who dominate them use some extremely narrow, extremely particular definitions of "inclusive" and "global" that, in practice, exclude way, way too many people in a destabilizing and social mission undermining way.
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But the fact they're religious doesn't make their [secular context] mission of "offering soup" worse, and we're generally not using government funding to run them (though it does still happen occasionally; most of the handout comes in the form of being tax-exempt though).
The same cannot be said for the librarians- and the problem is that most of what they like has no literary value. When we were more neutral, those beliefs had to pay rent (so to speak); gay literature is perfectly acceptable (and the pretense that it isn't because muh socons has finally worn out its welcome) but it first and foremost has to succeed on its merits. We pay for those salaries and programs directly with government money, too.
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