Rick Anderson writes: “‘Are libraries neutral?’ This is the question that was posed at the ALA Midwinter President’s Program in Denver a few years ago. A diverse panel of librarians was asked to take turns responding to that question, with results that were sometimes very interesting and sometimes fairly predictable. There was a very big problem, though, and it lay in the organizing question itself. One can’t really answer it meaningfully without first asking a clarifying question: ‘neutral’ about what? In some ways neutrality in the library is clearly a very bad idea—and yet in some important ways, it’s absolutely essential.”