News/Commentary

Self-avowed ‘Marxist lesbian’ ALA president stands tall as more libraries withdraw from association

August 7, 2023 | | Print Article

The new president of the American Library Association (ALA), Emily Drabinski, is an avowed Marxist and lesbian who is sorry, not sorry for coming out in more ways than one.

She took over the leadership of the association that determines what libraries across the nation carry in the way of books and allows as far as activities go in July. One of her primary goals is fighting so-called “book bans” by parents nationwide.

“She said she wants to make sure that the LBGTQ community and Black people see themselves reflected in the books on their library shelves. And she’s planning to prepare libraries for the consequences of climate change, pointing to the severe flooding this summer in the Northeast,” NBC News reported.

“But 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. Conservative Republican lawmakers in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Wyoming have pushed their states’ libraries to withdraw from the ALA, citing a since-deleted tweet Drabinski wrote after her election in April 2022,” the media outlet continued.

“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,” Drabinski wrote at the time. “I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! And my mom is SO PROUD. I love you mom.”

Since then, states have been lining up to cut ties with the ALA, not wanting any “association with an organization led by a Marxist.” Conservatives have branded the organization “woke” and “radical.” They are also accusing it of pushing a sexual agenda on children.

Drabinski, 48, is not only a proud lesbian, but she is also a dedicated Marxist who’s not going to hide her political opinions.

“I was excited to highlight and celebrate two aspects of my identity that are really important to me, and are often under a lot of scrutiny,” Drabinksi said in an interview with NBC News.

“She said she wanted to show a sense of pride to peers who share those identities with her, some of who voted for her because of it, she said. ‘I didn’t anticipate these kinds of targeted attacks being used as a bludgeon against library workers across the country. I really think that is regrettable, and I wish that wasn’t happening right now,'” she told the media outlet, predictably painting herself as a victim.

NBC News couched its reporting as informative but it came on as yet another attack against conservatives and parents.

“The ALA documented the highest number of attempted book bans in 2022 since it began tracking such efforts in 2001. People in Pennsylvania, Florida and West Virginia have filed criminal complaints attempting to have librarians arrested and charged with obscenity, though none have succeeded, while several GOP governors signed bills that would make it easier to arrest librarians for letting children check out books they deem ‘harmful to minors,'” the article noted.

“Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Mike Braun of Indiana demanded last week that federal funds for the ALA be halted, and that the government investigate the organization for allegedly advising librarians to discriminate against a Christian book publisher. Mike Flynn, the retired Army general and former Trump adviser who has become a conspiracy theorist and a local Republican leader in Florida, attacked the ALA recently for being led by ‘Marxist thugs,'” NBC News reported.

The Idahoan native asserts that her critics are part of “organized pro-censorship efforts” by people who “want to erode support for public institutions that enable access to information for everyone.”

The ALA appears to have gone full Marxist itself, “The ALA has plans to beef up its support for libraries facing political challenges, including raising funds to hire lawyers and providing crisis communications support. The ALA will launch a ‘campaign school’ to support and encourage ‘people who believe in intellectual freedom’ to run for school and library boards, Tracie Hall, the group’s executive director, said at the group’s national conference in June.”

The organization is claiming that the last time state chapters withdrew from their ranks was during the Jim Crow era.

“When trustees of the Montana State Library Commission debated leaving the ALA at their meeting last month, board member Tom Burnett said that their oath of office forbade them from being associated with a group led by a Marxist. Moms for Liberty chapters outside Montana had called on its members to urge the commission to leave the ALA, hoping to set a precedent for other states to withdraw as well over the organization’s ‘Marxist lesbian’ president,” NBC News noted.

Wyoming’s chair of the state’s Freedom Caucus, Rep. John Bear, announced that he is urging his state to leave the ALA because he believes the association is full of Marxists who promote books that “create a sexualized child at an earlier age” and are “turning libraries into activist training grounds.”

“The ALA has allowed this political point of view to infiltrate every aspect of their training,” he claimed in an interview. “And their trainings are just completely full of things like, how to deal with parents who don’t appreciate the type of materials that are available to children in the library, how to deal with your state legislature or your local government.”

Wyoming state Rep. Pepper Ottman charged in a July 12 webinar that the ALA’s recommended reading lists were provided “to open children up to pornography” and to groom them for sex trafficking.

Drabinski commented that she doesn’t want the organization to “get stuck talking exclusively on the terms that they have set for us rather than the terms that I think the rest of us operate on every day.”

“My own personal political viewpoint is a target right now, but my personal agenda doesn’t drive the association. It’s the agenda of all of us together,” she remarked.

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