[user104658]

Originally Posted by bitontheslide

this strikes me as a calculated offering to create confrontation and publicity. A bookstore is free to stock or not stock any books they want to and that's always been the case

Indeed, a cynical publicity grab, they can stock whatever they want of course but choosing to do it loudly isn't about making an ethical stand... is it... it's about drawing attention. These days it seems like people are generally OK with people hijacking their cause for self-publicity, though, so long as the message fits the tribal zeitgeist.

On a personal level I wouldn't be interested in a bookshop that is anything other than politically neutral. Half the point of GOING to a physical book shop would be to see if something outside your usual sphere of influence catches your eye ... if you know what you're looking for you buy online for a fraction of the price like everyone else .

Quite seriously though this trend towards some variant of revisionism and book-burning is a bit concerning. If we started burning the books of every author we disagree with or even those who have a blatantly murky personal history we'd be going round the shelves with a supermarket trolley FULL of books for the pyre. Imagine thinking you can only consume content made by squeaky-clean people who are on your personal and political page . What does a generation of people living in that sort of intellectual closed-system look like? Not a world I'm ever going to advocate, really. And no I'm not saying the Harry Potter series is top tier intellectualism - but once you start stripping one set of books from the shelves (and dousing them in lighter fluid along the way)... that's a pandoras box that it would be very naive to assume you can close.

What happens if other book stores or chains start stripping LGBT literature from their shelves because of their personal beliefs? Is that difficult to imagine? How will anyone who champions this action be able to say one word about it? If you say "taking books off the shelves is fine... burning books is fine..." it becomes very, very difficult to then say "hold on, I didn't mean THOSE books!!"