Emily Drabinski, the new “Marxist lesbian” president of the American Library Association (ALA), had just taken office last month when the backlash began.
One by one, states started to withdraw or consider withdrawing support for the organization. Conservative groups mobilized. Politicians called for an investigation into the ALA. A new competing “World Library Association” launched. By early August, 15 states had joined to fight against the ALA, part of an unprecedented counterattack against the oldest and largest library membership organization and the progressive policies it now stands for.
But while its president may be brand new, its policies are not. The ALA was captured by the left well before Drabinski’s arrival.
Years ago, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom advised members to “re-frame” the messaging on gender ideology “as diverse materials and programming that are about inclusion, fairness, and protection of everybody’s right to see themselves … in the public library.”
And over the years, the ALA has been telling its gender ideology story to a younger and younger audience, through both its programming and the books it recommends.
The organization promotes “Drag Queen Story Hour” library programs for children as young as four on its website:
[Source: American Library Association Public Programs Office website.]
“Kids love it!” they insist. And if their parents don’t love it, then they are the problem. The ALA provides policies to protect librarians from censorship and resources “to help libraries defend Drag Queen Story Hour and other Pride-themed events and displays.”
The ALA’s website is itself an engine of radical advocacy, urging children aged 0-5 to “embrace alternative gender identities.” For 14-17-year-olds, the ALA celebrates books such as this one whose cover shows a trans teenager’s breast removal scars. And its Rainbow List promotes sexually perverse books for all ages: “from babies and children to tweens and teens.”
The problem of how to hide all this obscenity from parents (aka “book banners”) came up at the ALA’s June webinar, reports Haley Kennington, Research and Archive Director for the Daily Wire’s online film What is a Woman. At that online meeting, librarians were told not to label LGBTQ literature as such because “it makes it too easy for parents or community members to find.” Instead, they should use “dummy covers.”
Given the ALA’s long track record of promoting woke and gender ideology, you might think that Drabinski’s installment would be an unremarkable next step in the left’s long march through yet another institution.
But she has so openly aligned herself with the cultural Marxists that, this time, based on the negative attention she has drawn these past few weeks, the ALA may have overplayed its hand.
Drabinski’s record of activism is also extensive, notwithstanding her efforts to erase it.
When she was elected last year, Drabinski infamously identified herself as a “Marxist lesbian” in a tweet she later deleted:
Earlier this week, Drabinski defended that tweet in an NBCnews.com puff piece, calling it “regrettable.” Not the tweet, mind you, the conservative “backlash” to it.
Don’t expect regret from Drabinski. She digs in her heels, saying she just wanted to “highlight and celebrate” her Marxist lesbian identity, nothing more. What she’s really there to do is “tackle the pressing issues facing her profession, such as shoring up funding and fighting a record number of book ban attempts nationwide.”
But that single tweet isn’t all Drabinski deleted:
That is a 2016 page removed from her personal website, archived here, where she shares her real ambition: “Queering the Catalog.” It’s based on her 2013 paper about classifying and cataloging information “from a queer perspective.”
In his deep dive into Drabinski’s paper, James Lindsay explains what that means: “Queer” theorists like Drabinski, he says, are Marxist disrupters who “literally want to destroy the card catalog to tell a different story”—theirs.
And in their world, “gender and sexuality are not immutable characteristics.”
From her deleted personal website:
In line with those views, as ALA president, Drabinski wants to give “queer kids a safe place” and build “collective power.”
What Marxists typically want to do with that collective power is create chaos to destroy existing institutions and values. It’s hard to believe Drabinski doesn’t see that as her new job at the ALA. She says as much in her mission statement here:
We need to make trouble—good trouble, the kind of trouble that matters, the kind of trouble I became a librarian to get into—and we need to make it together.
In fact, if it were up to Drabinski, she would release all the troublemakers to wreak havoc on society: “The freedom to read for everyone,” she wrote last month, “requires an end to the prison.”
Based on all the trouble she’s caused already, queering the catalog—and the kids—just might be a bridge too far.
But as of now, the ALA has the power and funding to do it—if allowed.
ALA librarians call the shots, as Tom Jones, director of the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) explains. They are the gatekeepers for what books come into the library and where they go in the stacks; that is, they determine the ages at which children will have access to them.
And they are funded not only by taxpayer dollars, but also, according to a report from the AAF, with money donated in the past from George Soros.
So when Montana became the first state last month to withdraw from the ALA, it was a step in the right direction. But as Jones explains, Montana’s decision only involves one state library. That is because of the dual funding arrangement that exists between the federal and state governments:
Other libraries can continue their membership unless and until the state decides to block state and local libraries from funding the conferences and membership fees that are the lifeblood of the ALA.
The ALA is not going down until its funding is cut off completely. For that to happen, states will have to decide “we’re not going to do this anymore, no more funding smut,” he says.
With Emily Drabinski as the new ALA president, they may have reached that point.
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