Conservative lawmakers in GOP state legislatures across the country have ignited a movement to disassociate local libraries from the American Library Association (ALA).
On Thursday, three more chapters of conservative state Freedom Caucuses, including Arizona, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania, endorsed the Montana State Library Commission’s move this month to sever ties with the ALA and encouraged their own libraries to do the same. Another prominent conservative lawmaker in Texas called on his state’s Library and Archives Commission to follow suit after the ALA elected an avowed Marxist as president.
The ALA has come under fire from conservative lawmakers after the association’s election of a far-left activist to lead the organization, which now defends sexually explicit material being presented to children. Emily Drabinski, the new president of the ALA, celebrated her election as a “Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world.”
“I am so excited for what we will do together,” Drabinski wrote in a social media post last year. “Solidarity!”
More than a dozen conservative lawmakers in the Idaho legislature called on the state’s library commission to part ways with the ALA on Monday.
“We have significant concerns about the election of Emily Drabinski, a self-described ‘Marxist-lesbian,’ as the next president of the ALA,” lawmakers said in a statement. “Her election raises issues about libraries’ involvement in exposing children to explicit materials and injecting hard-left politics and sexuality into publicly funded libraries.”
In April, The Daily Signal reported a list of 13 books the association recommended teens and young adults pick up in a radical expression of “freedom to read.” The ALA described the 13 books as the most “challenged” in the current educational environment, blaming anti-LGBT prejudice. All the books on the list, however, feature sexually explicit material, some of which is pornographic.
The four legislatures that began preparing to terminate their state’s relationship with the ALA on Thursday joined lawmakers in Idaho, Wyoming, Georgia, and Mississippi. A total of nine states have now joined the movement, with Montana becoming the first state to make the separation official. More are expected to announce in the coming weeks.
“We join other state Freedom Caucuses and call on the [South Carolina] Library Association to leave the NLA,” wrote the South Carolina Freedom Caucus on Twitter. “It’s time to stop using taxpayer money to fund Marxist organizations corrupting our kids.”
“Texas should fight Marxist ideology, not subsidize it,” wrote Texas Rep. Brian Harrison.
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