There was a flurry of concern online last week about a San Francisco bookstore that declared it would no longer sell books by J. K. Rowling. The store made the decision after Rowling, a billionaire and anti-trans troll, announced that "she would use her personal wealth to fund the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, which describes itself as a legal fund to support 'individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.'"
There are valid concerns about such a move, but most of the discussion I saw exhibited the usual confusion about freedom of expression, censorship, and gender. People seem to be overlooking the fact that booksellers are also book buyers, and they're no more obligated to buy a given book than their customers are. It would be worrisome if Amazon or Barnes & Noble were to decide not to carry books by a certain author, but that's not likely to happen, and I'm not sure I'd object if they did. Every case has to be evaluated on its own merits. In this case, Rowling has made her personal brand inseparable from her politics, rather as Elon Musk has done, or Orson Scott Card before them. Uncomfortable as they are, boycotts are a valid tactic, even when I oppose specific cases.
I wrote about this at length a decade ago,
when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers." It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs. In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business. If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!...It seemed to me that the people who called the bookstore's action a "ban" were the same kind of people who would deny that getting books removed from public libraries or public school libraries is a ban. After all, they say reasonably, if you want your kids to read filth you can always buy it for them on Amazon; it's not censorship to remove books from a library, since no library can stock all books. They conveniently forget that the pressure groups want laws passed that will force librarians to remove books they dislike. That's government action, and by their own definition it's censorship.
[Comics artist and blogger Barry Deutsch] drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies. It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business. It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. [Barry] argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. Again, [Barry] doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.
I've been wondering how younger kids feel about Rowling's stance and actions. After all, the Harry Potter books getting long in the tooth now; the first was published in 1997, the last in the series in 2007. Will a new generation of kids be swayed by the batty opinions of their parents' favorite author, or will they be turned off by them? One independent bookstore's boycott won't affect Rowling's net worth, but a generation's antipathy might.
