Is it possible that there are at least some specific social issues on which the library definitely should take an explicit and non-neutral position? This is where things get tough. For example, virtually all of us who work in libraries would, I’m sure, agree that racism is bad, and should be opposed. Shouldn’t the library take a firm position against racism? And how about child abuse, or sexism? How can the library fail to take a stance against these things? Few, if any, would say “racism is a good thing.” But reasonable people might disagree as to whether a particular book is racist. There’s a problem here, though, and that is that the population any library serves will not uniformly agree on how things like racism, sexism, and child abuse should be defined—and depending on how they are defined, there may be a variety of differing viewpoints held by reasonable and well-informed people. Few, if any, would say “racism is a good thing.” But reasonable people might disagree as to whether a particular book or group is racist. So while the library might wisely avoid collecting books that celebrate racism as such, it might also reasonably collect books that some members of its community consider to be examples of racism. (And depending on its mission, it might actively collect racist books for educational purposes.) On the issue of child abuse, a library might reasonably collect books that argue against any kind of corporal punishment for children and shelve them alongside books that argue in favor of corporal punishment — not because the library is neutral on the issue of child abuse, but because it declines to take an organizational stance on the question of whether corporal punishment necessarily constitutes child abuse.
This is not a neutral standpoint