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Are all uncensored drawn images of sexual acts erotica or are you drawing some distinction between the two?
"Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves." I don't know what this is supposed to be telling me; this is a fully generalizable argument against having libraries at all. If you want a math textbook, you're also free to pay for it yourself if you like math? Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.
Absent some evidence I am loath to accept your null hypothesis, just as you are clearly loath to accept mine. I will also note that you have chosen a specific slice of the argument I was making to defend by focusing solely on what you call drawn erotica and not, say, graphic images of war in history books. Do you support the latter being available in public libraries? If so, again, why the distinction?
Assuming that you were correct for the sake of argument, I think a pretty good justification for the change would be the Internet. Everyone already has unlimited free access to whatever type of content they want online, so it seems strange to put some special restrictions on an alternative service that is also available to serve the public at large (making it even less competitive than it already is with the Internet). Why would it be incumbent on the librarians to restrict their hub-of-information service when this onus is not placed on the Internet at large to do the same?
I fundamentally don't buy the arguments that children are being nefariously exposed to dangerous erotic content in some unique way through their public (not school) libraries. If their parents are so lax as to allow them to view dangerously inappropriate material in a public physical facility which has demarcated children's sections, when the system requires you to check out books for a defined length of time under a particular name, then those parents are lax enough that restricting the public libraries will have no effect anyway.
And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.
And of course, there is room for nuance in all of these points. There is a great difference between erotic books being available in some clearly marked corner of the library vs. being advertised up front and loudly to all who enter.
I make the case that erotic images have always been a special category that was treated differently, from the beginning of public libraries. Public libraries were designed and intended to educate, uplift, and edify their users. You have to make the case for why we should change.
My hypothesis is the null hypothesis because prior to May 28, 2019, the question “Should we have comic books depicting blowjobs both in the public library and marketed to under-18s” would have probably caught the questioner a pedophilia accusation. It would have been so uncontroversially a negative that even to ask the question would be suspicious, and yet it only took the release of Gender Queer for a vocal minority to argue that I’m the one who has to explain why it shouldn’t be in the public library.
At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.
The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I don’t find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing. “The Internet is for Porn”, after all, so libraries can and should be for something else.
This reasoning always shows up eventually. Of course I’m free to not take my kids to the public library. But I also used to be free to take them there and be fairly confident the worst thing they could stumble across was some text erotica. My parents could be reasonably certain the worst thing I would stumble across was a kiss and a fade to black in a fantasy novel. Their parents could pretty much trust the worst thing they were going to come across was a “Damn!”
The point is that my freedom to trust that the public library is in accord with what I and people like me view as the public interest has been slowly degrading for 40 years or more. This limits our access to and trust in the library and when we complain about it or express our grievances, we are met with your reasoning.
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This is obviously a generational battle and will continue to be so. I don’t fault my predecessors for not understanding what was going on, because it probably felt like having to explain to someone that the sky is blue and the grass is green, and that while sometimes the sky is orange and the grass is yellow, they still aren’t the same thing, only to be met with adamant accusations that the sky and the grass are the same thing until their will to resist was exhausted.
Now we are living in the world where everyone is expected to act like the sky and the grass are the same thing, and unsurprisingly it is starting to crack up under its contradictions.
The weirdest thing about gas stations stocking porn magazines was the 711 policy of stripping the cover off the damaged magazines and giving them away to customers. It was such a weird blend of considerate and inappropriate.
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