During an interview with ABC News on Monday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) responded to concerns that new Illinois law that would punish the removal of books from libraries due to personal objections would lead to children being exposed to books that their parents didn’t want them to by stating that “communities hire the librarians in their libraries. They’re experts at this.”
After Pritzker claimed that the law is really about letting parents decide what their children read, host Linsey Davis asked, “[L]et’s say you have a librarian who puts a book like ‘Gender Queer’ on the library school shelf, and then a parent says, well, now my child brought this book home or they read this book and I didn’t give the permission, I wasn’t able to establish whether or not they could read it?”
Pritzker responded, “Well, communities hire the librarians in their libraries. They’re experts at this. And all we’re really saying is that the libraries need to adopt a standard. There has to be some kind of a standard that they’re living by and that bill of rights that the American Library Association has put forward is one that simply says that you can’t take a book off the shelf simply for personal disapproval. Remember, there’s some other family that might think that that book is just fine.”
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