American Library Association – New Bud Lite In Culture Wars?

For all American institutions today, we must continue to ask the question of whether we ought to reform, replace, or break them up. The shenanigans at the DOJ have put this institution and the agencies under it foremost in people’s minds. Merrick Garland’s assignment of the man who arranged a sweetheart deal for Hunter Biden to be a “special prosecutor” for Hunter Biden is a sickening display of a now years-long politicization. Our Justice department seems to have been infiltrated by those who are committed to injustice, if it will keep our ruling class and its relentless push to the left in place.

The DOJ isn’t like Bud Lite. You can’t simply stop buying to solve a federal agency when it’s going bad. But what about a powerful non-profit tied to many state governments and funded heavily by Congress?  The American Library Association (ALA) is a case in point.

The ALA has recently been in the news due to the resurfacing of an April 2022 tweet (since deleted) by then- president-elect Emily Drabinski: “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! And my mom is SO PROUD. I love you mom.”

In response to the attention, the regime media kicked into gear to defend Drabinski, who started her term as president this July. NBC in typical fashion portrayed this as a typical “Republicans Pounce!” story, reporting that “some Republicans have focused on a single tweet Drabinski sent over a year ago to incite an effort to defund and abandon the ALA, the oldest and largest nonprofit trade organization for libraries.”

Ah, yes, it’s all about that single tweet.

In reality, the ALA has been hard at work attempting to defeat a whole host of laws that have been proposed in various states that deal with all the obsessions of the left. As the Daily Caller reported: “The ALA has identified five types of legislation that the organization believes would ‘impair’ the ability of librarians, including parental rights bills, ‘legislation to eliminate obscenity,’ Critical Race Theory (CRT) or LGBTQ content bans, human trafficking prevention acts and mandatory database and electronic resource regulation filtering bills, according to the group’s website.” 

The ALA is dead set against parents knowing what is available for children in libraries (including public school libraries), having a say as to what’s available, and being informed as to what their own children are checking out of these libraries. And they are certainly against filters that block pornography in library computers as the default setting (even if adults could request removal of these filters during their use of the computers). They also want to fight any legal challenges to pornographic books being available to minors. An article about the ALA’s recent $1 million grant that they obtained to fund court cases defending their right to put sexually explicit graphic novels about homosexuality in library holdings includes discussion of how the organization is trying to define down pornography. Be advised when clicking on the link: images of some of the books they defend are included in the article.

As NBC put it, however, this was all much ado about nothing. They cited ALA executive director Tracie Hall’s announcements of the organization’s plans for a “campaign school” to train “people who believe in intellectual freedom” to take over library and school boards.

Yet it doesn’t seem to be the case that Drabinski or the organization are interested in old-fashioned intellectual freedom. What they are interested in, as Drabinski’s 2013 article in The Library Quarterly, “Queering the Catalog,” described, is nothing less than the changing of how we understand knowledge by the standards of queer theory. In other words, what she wanted is to get rid of any normative understanding of humanity, especially in terms of sexuality and “gender.” What she wants and what the ALA wants is not some basic freedom of political thought. Instead, the desired goals are to get books catalogued under the queer and Marxist standpoints, so that library-goers will be catechized even by the way the books are laid out and under what search terms they are found, and to get books on sexuality written against any kind of sexual morality (except perhaps consent) on the shelves. Having Gender Queer and This Book is Gay, two explicit books much in the news, is what they are about and not the “intellectual freedom” to consider political points of view not their own.

Think it’s not true? Consider the attempts of Christian and conservative groups to have events at public libraries just as the “drag queen story hour” folks have done. Last year, Christian actor Kirk Cameron offered to come and host events where he would do readings from his first Brave Books title. Brave is a new, conservative children’s book publisher. If the ALA were for “intellectual freedom,” they might have put out a welcome sign to such groups and encouraged libraries to welcome Cameron and similar groups. Instead, over fifty libraries turned him down. After a backlash, some started to allow the events.

Due to the success of those events last year, Brave publicized a “See You At The Library” day for local groups to put on events on August 5.  Again, instead of being welcomed or encouraged by the “intellectual freedom”-loving ALA, they were sabotaged by them. A thread of tweets in June from Brave Books detailed how ALA executives had been giving advice in library conferences as well as via articles and internal emails about how local libraries could stop such events from happening. These ranged from falsely saying August 5 was completely booked to claiming that such events posed dangers due to security if Cameron were present to simply blocking off the rooms from use in order to prevent “right-wing ideology” from being purveyed at the library.

In fact, this year a Huntsville, Alabama, library at which Cameron attempted to host an event denied him permission under the excuse of “security” concerns until the religious freedom law firm First Liberty stepped in and threatened legal action for the violation of civil rights. The library finally gave in.

This behavior is galling not only because public libraries are funded through tax dollars, but because the ALA itself, a 501(c)(3) organization, has long received federal funding. In 2022 alone they received over $211 million. We are funding a private organization with taxpayer dollars to help public organizations who receive taxpayer dollars to discriminate against us and fight attempts to keep pornography out of kids’ hands and to allow parents oversight of their children’s use of library materials.

The good news in all this is that despite the ideological capture of the ALA, Americans are fighting back. The Montana State Library Association was the first to officially sever ties with the ALA, and legislators in Arizona, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, Georgia, Iowa, and Mississippi have proposed having their own library systems follow Montana’s lead. A letter signed by thirteen conservative groups, including AMAC Action, encouraged all state libraries to follow their lead as well. I hope Republicans in Congress will include defunding the ALA as a goal for the next budget cycle.

If they do, they will hear the inevitable cries that we can’t get along without the resources provided by the ALA. But it is not true. If the ALA is not reformable or exactly able to be broken up, it is certainly replaceable. In late July a press release was sent out announcing a brand new competitor to the ALA. The World Library Association (WLA) announced what they hope to bring: “a brighter future for libraries across the nation.” Their mission is summarized thus:

“The WLA will foster safe environments for librarians, curate valuable reading materials for children, and maintain a public space that promotes information literacy and political neutrality. It will also provide a comprehensive database of laws and legal cases pertinent to libraries, with a focus on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The WLA will stand with parents in legal battles for defending their children in school libraries, offering financial support and active assistance.”

It’s not clear that every public library is reformable either. But some of them no doubt are. Not every librarian has bent the knee to the Queer Theory Ba’al. They will now have an ally in trying to return their libraries to sanity. And for the places that are beyond hope, this author has advocated elsewhere that groups attempt to set up alternative libraries in their communities. I hope the WLA will take up the task of providing assistance to community and religious groups who might choose to set up their own libraries.

Most of us can’t do much about the DOJ. But we can and ought to do something about our local libraries. Let’s help them withdraw from the ALA and check out the WLA.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. His Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, co-edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, is now available in paperback from Notre Dame Press.