What an idiotic thing to say. How do you differentiate between an allergen and a toxin? At what point do you draw the line. Would you approve of me smoking marijuana in the library if your kids were present, how about dumping solvents in the community pool?
Both of THOSE are illegal actions: "apples and oranges" compared to innocuous things such as balloons and gloves (who WEARS rubber gloves in a library anyway?).
What is next? Banning all perfumes (not a bad idea, considering some scents) and deodorants? How about people who have allergies to synthetic cloth? Or have extremely sensitive hearing? Or have strange phobias?
<sarcasm>
Just think: "This library prohibits entry to individuals possessing bottles containing urine and crucifixes." The ACLU would have a collective stroke (again, not altogether a bad idea)! Or - "This library has removed all objectionable articles in keeping with being a bibliophobic-friendly environment."
</sarcasm>
Easily. Just go to that thingy that has a lot of words in it that tells you what other words mean - ya know, a dictionary - and look it up:
Allergen: A substance, such as pollen, that causes an allergy.
Toxin: A poisonous substance, especially a protein, that is produced by living cells or organisms and is capable of causing disease when introduced into the body tissues.
See how simple that works? Unless yer such a bleedin' heart liberal that you can't see the difference and believe that everyone must be regulated, subjugated and restricted because just one person is allergic or offended by something. Which your comment leads me to believe is true.
You might also go to the self same book of words and look up both 'analogy' and 'simile', and learn how and why they are used in language. And maybe reductio ad absurdam while you're there.
My comparison stands, as was pointed out by another poster to you. Just because one kid is allergic to latex shouldn't mean that everyone else must be deprived of anything that uses latex. My comments were specifically carrying your kind of logic to the extreme, pointing out that to follow the banning of latex, the library must ban flowers, peanuts, paper, dust or anything that any person could possibly be allergic to and have a reaction from. Same difference.
And having a remarkable grasp of factual information upon which, unlike yourself, I have based a lot of my beliefs, I would have no problem with you smoking marijuana in the library or in front of my kids. I happen to know that, factually, there would be less damage to them than you smoking tobacco in the same room as them. But like another poster pointed out, it is illegal for you to smoke MJ, so it again takes it into the apples and oranges realm as far as argumentation is concerned.
You apparently aren't aware that solvents are already being dumped into the community pool, under the guise of keeping the water clean. There are better ways to do it, but again, as far as the present argument goes, it's another apples and oranges thing. According to your knee jerk logic, all chemicals would have to be removed from the community pool, just because one child is allergic to them and wants to go swimming. Uh-oh, what happens if even one kid can't swim and could drown? Obviously, according to your way of thinking, all the pools would have to be shut down and drained, to accommodate the one who can't swim. I could come up with hundreds of more examples of extending your logic, but I have a feeling you are the only one who wouldn't get them.
You obviously don't grasp the concept of living within a society. Rights are not limitless, they stop when they infringe on the rights of others. For some latex exposure can result in very serious medical conditions. Your rights to rubber do not out weigh others rights to a non-toxic environment.
Now who is confused?? Most of us here certainly do grasp the concept of living within a society... probably much more so than you apparently do. I think your grasp of "rights" is rather tenuous at best and more than likely misguided. Just because one individual has some kind of physical problem doesn't mean that the entire rest of society must accommodate that person. This is especially true when the person with the problem is required to make no accommodation. That's essentially what you are requiring- that all latex be eliminated from anywhere that this afflicted person goes, but all the rest of "society" is then not allowed anything like balloons or rubber gloves. This kid may now freely go to the library, but all the kids who don't have his problem are not allowed to participate in a normal activity that has been going on previous to his "problem" and lawsuit.
For the vast majority of the population, latex is not toxic. Sorry, but one kid with an allergy, even if he was my own, wouldn't require the elimination of all latex from the public environment of all other kids.
Your comments are exactly the kind of dumbed down, liberal PC thinking that has turned our public schools into PC sewers of ignorance by requiring everything to be torn down to fit the least common denominator- the slowest and dumbest kid. And the emphasis there is on the least.
It would really be enlightening if you would go look up a few things in the big word book, and learn how to use some intelligence before you post. Otherwise, you just confirm what the rest of us already think about liberals. All hat and no cattle.
It has been pointed out that intelligence is distributed on a Bell curve- at any point, you can be sure 50% of the population are idiots. You apparently want to proudly rejoice in your firmly planted spot on the far left hand side of said curve.