The South Carolina State Library has officially terminated its partnership with the American Library Association (ALA), citing the group’s alleged partisanship, according to a letter shared Sept. 26.
The ALA selected Emily Drabinski — who described herself as a “Marxist lesbian” in a since-deleted tweet — to head the group in 2022. Drabinski said she hoped to use her position at the library to examine the “consequences of decades of unchecked climate change, class war, white supremacy, and imperialism have led us here.”
“ALA has become a distractor from the core mission of serving all people and has failed to develop an understanding of differences in geographic areas,” agency director Leesa M. Aiken wrote in a letter dated Aug. 21, according to screenshots shared on Twitter. “Guidance which has been provided by ALA concerning book bans, and handling difficult situations locally have quite frankly been tone-deaf and show a lack of understanding of what is happening in the field.” (RELATED: School Board Denies Admissions Process Was An Attempt At ‘Racial Balancing’)
“Guidance which has been provided by ALA concerning book bans, and handling difficult situations locally have quite frankly been tone-deaf and show a lack of understanding of what is happening in the field,” she argued.
The Montana State Library (MSL) Commission voted in July to leave the ALA, writing that, “Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist.”
The ALA has been working to kill legislation that prohibits librarians from distributing sexually explicit materials to minors. The group has argued such laws would “impair” librarians’ ability to effectively distribute “diverse” materials to community readers. The ALA is using an “adverse library legislation tracker” to target these and other laws, including legislation that seeks to protect parents’ rights. Members of the ALA were encouraged to work with “grasstops advocates who can engage with lawmakers and influencers” to defeat such “adverse” bills.
🚨HUGE: The South Carolina State Library just announced that they are ending their membership with the American Library Association!
The dominoes are falling for the ALA.
Turns out that electing a Marxist president and openly admitting to indoctrinating kids is a bad idea. pic.twitter.com/d8d4Epgy51
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 26, 2023
“Your organization, the national organization for libraries, has a professional obligation to provide resources that can be utilized by libraries and librarians to serve their patrons,” Aiken’s letter continued. “While this can be challenging, it is possible with inclusion and diversity. My hope is that this letter, the loss of membership, and the additional voices of my colleagues in the field will create reflection and action within ALA to be guided by the mission ‘to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.’”
During a keynote session at the ALA’s conference Library 2.0, University of Kentucky Associate Professor Dr. Shannon M. Oltmann argued books that contain pornographic content have value for kids.
“I don’t want people to get caught up in definitions of pornography definitions, especially definitions that say anything explicit or detailed should not be allowed. Sometimes those things are really valuable to students or other patrons,” Oltmann said.
“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, a director at ALA, said earlier in September.