VOTE NO for Public Funding for Taney County Library

This announcement has been amended from last night.

The unofficial count of the library tax vote is in. 50.49% yes, 49.51% no. It appears that the library tax has passed. When the official results are posted we will update information here.

Thank you to everyone who came out to vote! 🙌🏻

Thank you to everyone who voted no on the library ballot question! The results haven’t been posted yet. Keep checking here:

Taney County, MO Taney County, Missouri government website. The place to find out about all the services the County has to offer!

Read this article published by the American Library Association (ALA), "Intersections/GLBT Month: Dispatch from a Small Town Librarian." BTW, the Taneyhills Library is a member of the Missouri Library Association which is a state partner of the ALA.

Many on the vote yes side are saying a DQSH would never happen in Branson. We disagree. It CAN happen here. Branson is not exempt from cultural trends.

Here's a quote from the article...

Under a section titled, "Tips and tricks to being a secret librarian advocate operative:"

🧐 "Don’t give up. This is the most important lesson I can impart upon you. For instance, when you ask “Can I do a GLBT Book Month display in June?” And your supervisor says “No.” Or “Think of the children.” Or “Customers will complain.” Or “Why? There are no gay people here our town.” You could very easily be discouraged. (And angry.) (And confused. Don’t they know every Thursday is gay night at the town pub?) But don’t stop asking. Ask next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. One year they might say yes. And the year after that they might say “Sure you can do that again.” And it might become a tradition, and every year you can put up more rainbow flags than the year before. The only way you’ll find out is if you continue to be persistent. And if you’re thinking a display is a trivial example, it’s not really: A warm and friendly display can be welcoming to the LGBT folks in your community, who probably currently feel unwelcome, and it’s a simple thing to start with."

➡️➡️➡️ "Sure, you want to eventually get to Drag Queen Storytime, but you should start with something simple!"

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Library employees come and go. With a public model, it will be very difficult to maintain control over book collections for children and teens and to keep out the kind of objectionable content many parents have been opposing in stories across the nation. The same goes for DQSHs. A public library will have a very difficult time legally preventing one; a public library must give equal access to rooms open for public use.

Intersections | GLBT Book Month: Dispatch from a Small Town Librarian So you work for a library in a small, rural, conservative community? Are you a frontline staff member there, with no managerial or administrative authority? Do you wish you could do more to make your library more inclusive to the LGBTQIA+ community, but meet with resistance? I hope it’s not just m...

This is a very interesting article on the history of libraries in the United States and why public libraries take away freedom.

👉 Public libraries force ALL citizens to pay for a service only a few uses.

👉 Public libraries force citizens to pay for books, programs, and services they may not agree with.

👉 Public libraries claim to support the value of self-help while duplicitously insisting on compulsory taxation.

From the article:

The advocates of public libraries presented, and continue to offer, a variety of arguments supporting their cause. In an attempt to gain Constitutional legitimacy, statists assert that public libraries protect our rights and liberties, as well as promote happiness. Because of the number of books purchased by libraries, they argue, more books can be published, thus insuring freedom of speech. Libraries also provide information on hobbies, travel, and the arts, which encourages knowledge of culture, and therefore promotes happiness.

However, freedom of speech is possible only in a free society, in which the initiation of force has been abolished. Freedom of speech results in ideological competition—a marketplace of ideas, in which individuals are free to support those ideas they voluntarily choose. Extorting funds from individuals to purchase books effectively makes them supporters of ideas to which they may be diametrically opposed. The result is the publication of many books of dubious quality, at taxpayer expense, which few read.

The assertion that public libraries promote happiness is, at best, ludicrous. Whose happiness? And at whose expense? And even if this claim were true, it is irrelevant. A thief could argue that robbing my house would promote his happiness, but his action is still theft and still immoral. The principle does not change if government is doing the taking.

The avowed purpose of the public library is “to serve the public. Not some of the public. All of the public.”[3] This, of course, is impossible. It would require volumes of information on every imaginable topic, regardless of how small the number of potential users. Libraries, like restaurants, must specialize in order to appeal to the particular tastes of their clientele. Those who try to be everything to everyone eventually are nothing to anyone.

✅ VOTE NO for a publicly funded library on August 8th. Keep our library private.

Alternatives to Public Libraries | J. Brian Phillips Mr. Phillips is a free-lance writer based in Houston, Texas, Proponents of government programs often contend that the services provided by government could not be furnished by the private sector. It is in the public interest, they argue, that the government compel individuals to support these progra...

DID YOU KNOW..... Forsyth has a Privately-Funded Library??? It's in Taney County as well.