Red-State Libraries Pull Out Of The American Library Association

The Culture War continued in the United States as Red States such as Missouri, Montana, and Texas, and counties Midland TX, and Campbell County in Wyoming began to pull out of the ALA (American Library Association). The reason? The ALA’s defense of challenged books, which included sexuality and racism, and because of ALA President Emily Drabinski’s Tweet in which she referred to herself as a “Marxist lesbian.”

As crazy as that last part sounds, legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming have also joined in the call for withdrawal from the ALA. On the other hand, state library associations are not dropping their affiliation with the organization, and the Governor of Wyoming, Mark Gordon, a Republican, has pushed back against the letter from legislators and the Secretary of State asking him to remove the Wyoming State Library from the ALA as a Media Stunt.

Gordon also went on to say that the letter implied that Wyoming citizens and Wyoming parents weren’t capable of deciding how to best govern themselves and needed the morality police to show them the way.

If you’re not familiar with the ALA, they are a professional organization for librarians that offers guidance and professional development for librarians and advocates for Free Speech. Please Note: The ALA advocates for Free Speech, it also advocates for intellectual freedom and opposes censorship. By any means, it is not a political organization, it is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes libraries and library education internationally. Graphic Novel titles were the most frequently challenged books in the library.

The first library to leave the ALA was the Campbell County Library, where residents tried to have librarians prosecuted for having Sex Education on the shelves in 2021 and withdrew from the ALA, according to a report. The library even removed the ALA Bill of Rights, which states A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views, from their official policies, replacing it with a policy that reflects their viewpoints, a policy that emphasizes keeping obscene sexually explicit and graphic materials from the young-readers sections of the library and allowing staff to remove such materials without any official challenge or public notice.

In a new report from the American Library Association, the ALA has documented 1,269 challenges to more than 2,500 books in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since the association began tracking such efforts in 2001. It was a 75% Jump from 2021, which held the previous record. Do you know what were the most targeted themes? LGBTQIA+ titles, sending a message to the LGBTQIA+ community that they weren’t welcome to participate in community institutions.

An anti-LGBTQ group under the guise of being Pro-Family called Mass Resistance took credit for pressuring the library to withdraw from the ALA in a blog post, ironically making it clear that this didn’t have anything to do with family values, the children, or family, but rather it was motivated by the group’s hideous political ideology, mainly because they viewed the Campbell County Public Library System, the Library Director and staff as Leftists, saying that “the new conservative Library Board of Campbell County has now implemented a revised ‘Collection Development Policy’ that has strong teeth to force the obscenity and pornography out – and keep it out.” Fun fact, using bigoted and narrow-minded ideology to dictate what is right doesn’t get a person or party anywhere, it harms the growth of the individual, keeping them in the dark and unwilling to adapt or move forward in their lives.

A Law Professor from St. Louis’s Washington University, Gregory Magarian has been following Missouri’s departure from the ALA amid a debate over who could participate in the state’s local library’s story hour (mainly focusing on Drag Queens) and new state rules that seek to limit youth access to books that are deemed to be inappropriate for their age.

“When you see state governments kind of replacing that type of control by librarians with greater control by politically motivated, politically ambitious, politically polarized government officials, I think that’s really troubling for the prospects for free access to ideas.”

Gregory Magarian, a Law Professor from Washington University

Source: AP News

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