Well, here’s an interesting juxtaposition.
You are probably aware of my lawsuit against a library for banning bare feet. I think I’ve also mentioned that my daughter is a librarian (she tolerates me :-)).
Well, she’s at a library conference in Toledo right now, and sent me a picture.
This is a painting they have on display at the Toledo Library:
Painting in the Toledo Main Library
[Added: the painting is part of a display of retro posters, so this portrays the way libraries used to be, or liked to be perceived.]
It’s a nice sentiment. It’s part of the image libraries like to portray:
We’re a nice homey place. Take off your shoes, get comfortable, read a book. That’s what libraries are good for.
But if you look at the Toledo Library Behavior Guidelines:
The following actions and behaviors are prohibited in the Library:
- Inappropriate dress: i.e., no shirt, no shoes.
The painting is just fluff. They don’t really mean it. Oh, they’ll say, everybody realizes that the painting is just metaphorical.
No. Everybody doesn’t. We expect you to be true to your word.
It’s like the Stark County District Library I talked about in The Feeling of Power. They use bare feet as a come-on, recognizing that they convey comfort and innocence and freedom and intellectual exploration.
But when push come to shove, they shove. Blatant hypocrisy. Bare feet are good enough to sell a library, but not good enough to take seriously. In the real world, in their real libraries, they say that the boy in that painting is in too much danger.
In my lawsuit, I pointed out that while the Fairfield County District Library was terribly concerned about the safety of bare feet on their floors, they somehow didn’t seem to mind children’s bare legs on that same, supposedly unsafe, floor. Here is the front page of a Lancaster Eagle-Gazette newspaper showing exactly that.
Click on picture to enbiggen.
After a while it gets really tiresome to keep seeing the come-ons followed by the contradicting excuses.
Ahcuah 
I’ve learned that life isn’t about Right vs. Left, but rather the individual vs. The State.
Boy what a sham! I guess they only except legally mandated diveristy. If their advertizement doesn’t beat all.
What I am most curious about is what did these libraries do 40 years ago? Is anyone that worked there back then still there? I doubt it, but it would be interesting to find a retired librarian who worked in any library and ask what was done then. Did they spend all day kicking out barefoot people during the warm months of the year? Or did they conveniently make those rules after going barefoot went out of style? Do the librarians of today even know that going barefoot was once in style, and how many young people were doing that? I thought librarians, above the average person, would have the intellectual curiosity about our past culture and history, that they would know all this. Or maybe not.
I answer Beach Bum’s question in The Genesis of Library Barefoot Rules.
This is called hypocrisy. I have heard many senior people talking about how they went barefoot all the time as kids, but they never let their children or grandchildren go barefoot… even indoors… for this or that (more or less verisimilar, sometimes very far-fetched) reason.