"I guess this is just what's happening."

September 18, 2023 6:04 AM

Red States Quit American Library Association (WaPo gift link) State libraries in Montana, Missouri, and Texas have cut ties with the 150-year-old organization, and Freedom Caucus conservatives in at least ten other states are urging the same.
posted by box (88 comments total)

Today is just a terrible day for news.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:23 AM on September 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

Conservative media has convinced a generation of people to focus on crap like libraries and drag queens while their elected officials are actively harming those people with their policies.

They are focused on libraries because, the more a child learns about other people and other perspectives, the more they learn to empathize with people who are different from them, and the more they vote Democrat. It all comes back to consolidation of power.

In other words, all their talk of "indoctrination" is projecting - they want to be the ones doing the indoctrinating.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 6:24 AM on September 18, 2023 [76 favorites]

They are focused on libraries because, the more a child learns about other people and other perspectives, the more they learn to empathize with people who are different from them, and the more they vote Democrat.

The current base of the Republican Party is people whose kids don't come to Thanksgiving anymore, and it certainly can't be their fault.
posted by Etrigan at 6:35 AM on September 18, 2023 [95 favorites]

If I was a resident of those states I would be satisfied if the haters just didn't come to the town library any more. Unfortunately, their endgame will be for the libraries to either turn into Christian bookstores or close down.

This overwhelming need to spoil things so no one else can have anything -- does it occur elsewhere in nature? or is it just a human thing?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:38 AM on September 18, 2023 [26 favorites]

The modern Gadsden flag: Don't Read To Me.
posted by Nelson at 6:50 AM on September 18, 2023 [16 favorites]

It's a bit predictable in a way, with the head of the ALA tweeting she was a Marxist lesbian. I'm not saying she was wrong to do so, but it was a red flag to the right in the same way someone saying they were proud to be a Nazi would be to the left.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:52 AM on September 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

Now is a good time to check who is on your local library board and how one gets that position.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:53 AM on September 18, 2023 [22 favorites]

"Saying the quiet part out loud" -- they're good at aping the language of the center and left when it suits them.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:54 AM on September 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

Twenty-four years ago, Kleinman’s kindergartner son brought home “Mangaboom,” a book Kleinman felt contained an age-inappropriate reference to skinny-dipping. When a school official told him the book made it into the library because it was ALA approved, Kleinman said, he launched what became a decades-long campaign of blogging to expose what he calls the ALA’s provision of pornographic books to children.

The ALA took my baby away.

Seriously, though, the conflation of ... skinny dipping?! ... with pornography in this guy's mind is just mind-blowing. Heaven forfend children should know that other people are naked under their clothes.

This is a topic that's near and dear to me, as my daughter (9) is a voracious reader who takes out several e-books from the library every week. I sort of glance at them now and then, but truthfully? I want her to read whatever she wants to read. That some rotten-brained choad should be able to remove books from the library because they offend his sensibility is gross.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:03 AM on September 18, 2023 [22 favorites]

It's pretty rich, in the age of ubiquitous Internet, to refer to anything else at all as "a conduit for pornography."
posted by Western Infidels at 7:20 AM on September 18, 2023 [48 favorites]

Oh don't worry, they're coming for the Internet too
posted by gc at 7:24 AM on September 18, 2023 [22 favorites]

The idea that kids become "sexualized" by reading a book with some juicy parts is, of course, pushing responsibility for adults' worst tendencies onto other people, like librarians and the kids themselves.

"I didn't think that 8-year-old was hot until I found out she read part of her aunt's romance novel that one time. Damn books! Taking away our kids' innocence!"

I know. I'm yelling into a void. It's the only thing I'm good at, now that those damn dirty libraries let me read Nietzsche.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:26 AM on September 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

A whole generation of GenX kids read Flowers In The Attic and didn't all become kid-poisoning incest mongers.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:28 AM on September 18, 2023 [48 favorites]

According to these people, we did become kid-poisoning incest mongers. I think they would use those exact words.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:31 AM on September 18, 2023 [29 favorites]

A whole generation of GenX kids read Flowers In The Attic and didn't all become kid-poisoning incest mongers.

Speak for yourself.
posted by Ickster at 7:32 AM on September 18, 2023 [25 favorites]

My joke kind of falls flat hitting a few seconds after I-Write-Essays' comment.
posted by Ickster at 7:34 AM on September 18, 2023 [23 favorites]

It's a bit predictable in a way, with the head of the ALA tweeting she was a Marxist lesbian. I'm not saying she was wrong to do so, but it was a red flag to the right

I understand what you're saying, but it also needs to be said that "centrists" in the library world and elsewhere will absolutely use this logic both to keep progressives and leftists out of positions of authority, block progressive change, and make concessions to the hard right. That dynamic -- conservatives expressing outrage, centrists going "well maybe we shouldn't antagonize them" -- is one of the key ways that left-wing positions get marginalized.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 7:41 AM on September 18, 2023 [57 favorites]

Also simply being a lesbian is a red flag to the right. They will harass her for it whether she says so or not. (I also suspect these geniuses are not educated enough to understand the difference between "Marxist", "socialist", and "communist". When your agenda is "don't read books" then things like the foundation of the last 150 years of economics and history are unknown to you.)
posted by Nelson at 7:49 AM on September 18, 2023 [21 favorites]

Related: Top librarian calls 'Marxist lesbian' tweet backlash 'regrettable'. Drabinski's own thoughts.

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.”

That strikes me as a little naïve but well meaning. Living under constant attack for who you are means navigating a minefield of hidden threats. Sometimes you overlook one and the mine blows up.
posted by Nelson at 7:51 AM on September 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Furthermore, what is so wrong with tweeting that one is a marxist lesbian? It's not like tweeting that you're a Stalinist and think the Holodomor was good, actually, and I assume that we're not saying that tweeting that you're a lesbian is bad. The conservative equivalent would be more like "I'm straight and I support trickle-down economics".

Any statement of lefti-ish politics gets positioned as "I eat babies in my Democrat supported welfare penthouse apartment while wrapped in stolen minks", that's the problem.
posted by Frowner at 7:51 AM on September 18, 2023 [50 favorites]

"The Library is a Commons" by Emily Drabinksi, president ALA, In These Times August/September 2023 print edition:

Librarians spend public resources in ways that benefit the public, making highly local decisions that reflect engagement with the communities they serve....

What these public institutions have in common is their circulatory function. Libraries move public resources around, and they work to enable equal access to those resources for everyone in the community. In the context of more than four decades of neoliberal disinvestment in public institutions, the persistence of public libraries is surprising....

Library workers secure the right to read Gender Queer, but they also secure public institutions, public resources and public ownership of the public good.

posted by audi alteram partem at 7:56 AM on September 18, 2023 [11 favorites]

Furthermore, what is so wrong with tweeting that one is a marxist lesbian? It's not like tweeting that you're a Stalinist and think the Holodomor was good, actually

To me personally, nothing. But the US has been red-scaring about Marxism for over 100 years, and even a person who's not a far-right ideologue might be taken aback. Now I think that's a bad thing, but it's also reality, and one that a leader of a large organization has to be cognizant of.

It makes me sad that Drabinski can't celebrate her personal successes without it affecting her organization, but that's true of CEOs and businesses, too.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:02 AM on September 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

The Post article tries very hard to both-sides this story, quoting not only some librarians, but also some book banners and John Ashcroft, and for some reason some dink from the American Enterprise Institute, in a way that I don't think quite works for me.

Said dink is like (paraphrased) 'well, I blame the ALA--if you advocate a political position, some asshole is going to call you a pedophile,' and that take seems just willfully ignorant.

Supporting First Amendment rights and having public institutions serve everyone in the community have always been part of the ALA's mission, and both of those used to be nonpartisan positions that most people supported.

It's not so much libraries getting political as it is far-right Republicans trying to culture war (they don't like it when we call it Evangelical white supremacy) all the things.
posted by box at 8:04 AM on September 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

Seriously, though, the conflation of ... skinny dipping?! ... with pornography in this guy's mind is just mind-blowing.

Honestly, I kinda find it mind-blowing that you find this mind-blowing. There’s always been a quite large portion of the populace that do, indeed, find any depiction of nudity to be pornographic, and they’ve never been shy about imposing their views on the rest of us. None of this is surprising. Dismaying as hell, yes. But not the least bit surprising.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:04 AM on September 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

What they really ought to do is ban the teaching of reading to children. Nip this whole problem in the bud.
posted by axiom at 8:09 AM on September 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Better yet, let's get rid of this whole "free peasant" nonsense. The peasants come with the land, they can't leave the land, and "reading" gives them all these silly aspirations beyond the ox and plow. Soon enough they'll want to petition their lord! Ha! Can you imagine?
posted by Philipschall at 8:16 AM on September 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

I think the attitude that it's not strategic to be out of the closet or a Marxist is not commentary on the lavender scare, but part of the lavender scare itself.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:28 AM on September 18, 2023 [32 favorites]

Yes, precisely.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 8:43 AM on September 18, 2023

To be fair, these red states aren’t just quitting the ALA, they do have a perfectly viable and reasonable alternative plan in place.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 8:52 AM on September 18, 2023

Where this ends up is that scene in "Death of Stalin" where they rather desperately need a competent doctor, even passingly so. They realize their own policies (which they all variously waved into motion through malice, ignorance, or apathy) have brought them to a point where no help is available.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:55 AM on September 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

How so, Slackermagee? They may just end up closing their libraries in the long run.
posted by Selena777 at 8:59 AM on September 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's strange to me that the head of an organization such as the ALA thinks it's ok to identify as a marxist, or with any political ideology. One would think that it best serves the needs of the organization to remain as non-partisan as possible. Marxism, specifically, is very polarizing, I mean the communist party is still banned federally.
posted by sid at 9:00 AM on September 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm not an ALA member, and I'm no longer a librarian (in part because I'm trans, and cannot trust institutions to do the right thing) but have had the pleasure of meeting Emily a half-dozen times and she's a spectacular human being. Libraries need leaders like her.
posted by avocet at 9:10 AM on September 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

It's strange to me that the head of an organization such as the ALA thinks it's ok to identify as a marxist, or with any political ideology.

Head of the ALA is a political ideology in and of itself, in today's world. Might as well be precise.
posted by Etrigan at 9:13 AM on September 18, 2023 [17 favorites]

It's strange to me that the head of an organization such as the ALA thinks it's ok to identify as a marxist, or with any political ideology. One would think that it best serves the needs of the organization to remain as non-partisan as possible.

Okay, but the ALA and libraries have been under attack long before she said anything. And as Etrigan just said on preview, these people consider the very existence of the ALA to be ideological and partisan. And it's not like conservatives aren't gleefully advertising that they're fascists every chance they get.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:19 AM on September 18, 2023 [13 favorites]

Technically Marxism is an economic theory, not a political ideology. Which might not be worth bringing up in many contexts, but we’re talking about libraries, so.
posted by eviemath at 9:28 AM on September 18, 2023 [16 favorites]

"One would think that it best serves the needs of the organization to remain as non-partisan as possible."

The problem with being strategically non-partisan is that we have a lopsided idea of what is and isn't partisan.

Being aggressively capitalist is not seen as "partisan." Being straight isn't seen as partisan. The fact that we see being Marxist as partisan but not the other means that we have a fundamental imbalance.

The right is trying to (maybe already has) make it so that being anti-Nazi/anti-fascist is partisan.

Being pro-library is already being seen as partisan. So. The problem isn't that the head of the association is identifying as Marxist... it's that we're ceding the ground and not enough people that are left of center can or will express their positions on things without punishment.
posted by jzb at 9:29 AM on September 18, 2023 [48 favorites]

I think it would be more precise to say it's a theory of political economy. In fact, the central idea of marxism is that separating economic theory from political ideology can't be done.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:30 AM on September 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm a public librarian, mercifully in a place where books aren't being banned or challenged vociferously.

And I'm just so tired.
posted by SaharaRose at 9:30 AM on September 18, 2023 [20 favorites]

The meaning of saying “I’m a Marxist” to the right is functionally different from saying “I’m a Nazi” to the left because, at the very least, only one of those ideologies is inherently genocidal, and eliding that difference actively helps the right.
posted by vim876 at 9:35 AM on September 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

Voting for Emily Drabinski was one of the proudest moments in my two decades of ALA membership.

The right hates libraries because it requires a closed information ecosystem to prevent the children it believes it owns having the language to question its orthodoxies. Emily is just a pretext.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:35 AM on September 18, 2023 [28 favorites]

I'm not saying she was wrong to do so, but it was a red flag to the right

Sure, but there is no point in ceding any ground to -- or even making considerations for -- people whose entire personality is consumed by grievance and culture war bullshit. They exist to find things to get mad about and make it everyone else's problem.
posted by Dark Messiah at 9:35 AM on September 18, 2023 [23 favorites]

The idea that one tweet by the current head of the ALA has a causal relationship with a right wing propaganda campaign that started decades earlier doesn't bear serious consideration.
posted by StarkRoads at 9:42 AM on September 18, 2023 [27 favorites]

> The meaning of saying “I’m a Marxist” to the right is functionally different from saying “I’m a Nazi” to the left because

I was born in the USSR. My parents and uncles were political dissidents, and I have family that died from the gulag for being educated and jewish. If you say you're a Marxist to my parents' generation, or if you say you're a Social Democrat (whether bolshevik or menshevik), I think they take it literally and exactly the same as saying you're a Nazi.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:43 AM on September 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

great, a derail

if you read TFA and you're here to debate ideologies, take my vote to please go elsewhere

this is fucking war, there are people poised to destroy anything good left in the public sphere and contort it to their controlling, bullying, narrow vision. let me tell you, where I live ("socialist Canada") we've had recent newcomers burned out of their house, cars included, with "Go Home" spraypainted on the garage door. The assholes and bullies are planning a parade in town on Wednesday with their posters about "freedom" and "courage to speak up and protect the children".

if you are just waking up to what is happening, good for you. if you think the situation warrants tepid caution like that is going to do any good, you are quickly becoming a big fucking part of this problem. they're coming for you too, dumbass (I say this to no-one in particular, but I just don't understand people who can't see what is happening)
posted by elkevelvet at 9:52 AM on September 18, 2023 [59 favorites]

455.449 injuries total, including almost 100k concussions in the 2018-19 high school season

but it's those damned marxist lesbian librarians that are harming our kids
posted by pyramid termite at 9:56 AM on September 18, 2023 [20 favorites]

Recalling all the lascivious stuff I found in my middle and high school library, I just kind of scoff at this stuff. These people are so insecure about their hold on their kids. My liberal parents, one Jewish, one Episcopal, and neither really practicing, let me watch untold hours of The 700 Club for years and I have yet to turn into an evangelical Christian, believe in demons, or speak in tongues. Well, mostly the latter. Sometimes I do that to entertain our toddler.
posted by Captaintripps at 10:00 AM on September 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

This makes me really sad.
posted by bq at 10:01 AM on September 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

A whole generation of GenX kids read Flowers In The Attic and didn't all become kid-poisoning incest mongers.


Oh Totally. And All the Stephen King, including and mostly that, uh, scene in "It" that we pretend wasn't there.

The thing about a good moral panic is that it misses eveyrthing else. Like, everyone was so worried that MTV would turn us into satanists and it was critically important to ban 15 year olds from maybe buying a Motley Crue record, that no one batted an eye at a seventh grader in the suburban south toting around Lady Chatterley's Lover and Delta of Venus and all of the Anne Rice Sleeping Beauty But S&M books . (And at least one of those ("Chatterley") had been a previous generation's moral panic.) Ask me how I know. *

This current book obsessed, "drag queens are grooming my children," "what if the sexy fairy book turns my darling Aiden trans?" kerfuffle serves the dual purpose of cracking down on public education (which the Right has never liked) and also providing parents an extremely vague and yet somehow encompassing imaginary thing to freak out about instead of, you know, the absolutely terrifying, 100% real possibility that their children and all of their friends could, at any moment, be brutally gunned down at random in school, possibly by a kid not much older than they are and no one will do anything about it.


*I'm very sorry to report I did not become some brazen junior high school libertine after reading all the books. In part, because, uh, that would have involved teenage boys. Kind of a non-starter for me at the time. On the other hand, the books ended up being a launching pad to admittedly dangerous ideas like "maybe I'll be a lit major in college" and "Writing is a thing I could do for a living" etc.
posted by thivaia at 10:17 AM on September 18, 2023 [30 favorites]

Encouraging someone to think it's possible to make a living as a writer, what a truly monstrous thing to do to a child!?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:23 AM on September 18, 2023 [13 favorites]

Encouraging someone to think it's possible to make a living as a writer, what a truly monstrous thing to do to a child!?

I write for a living. That was a sarcasm fail on my end.
posted by thivaia at 10:26 AM on September 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

Me too. I was also being sarcastic.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:30 AM on September 18, 2023 [8 favorites]

Honestly, I kinda find it mind-blowing that you find this mind-blowing. There’s always been a quite large portion of the populace that do, indeed, find any depiction of nudity to be pornographic, and they’ve never been shy about imposing their views on the rest of us.

They're coming for My Neighbor Totoro next, aren't they?
posted by rhymedirective at 10:33 AM on September 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Schools and libraries are expensive, let's get rid of them to reduce our taxes. It combines their ideology with the true mission of reducing taxes so the wealthy can have Even More Wealth. It's Monday, I'm feeling like crap, and I think America may be over. Scary to think about what comes next for the 340 million living here.
posted by theora55 at 10:38 AM on September 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

Thanks, pyramid termite, I'll use that info next time I speak against book banning at the school board, and I'm sure that will happen, as my town has a nasty Extreme Xtian Right contingent.
posted by theora55 at 10:51 AM on September 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

OK, well, in the spirit of full transparency, I did go through a phase where I was mad at my mom for not letting me know that I was actually a unicorn after seeing The Last Unicorn. This phase lasted until the moment I attempted to walk on all fours on the sidewalk and scuffed up my knees.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:56 AM on September 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Encouraging someone to think it's possible to make a living as a writer, what a truly monstrous thing to do to a child!?
posted by I-Write-Essays

Is.... Is this where I type "eponysterical"?
posted by wenestvedt at 11:08 AM on September 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

I've been describing the Republican Party as the party of willful ignorance for about 20 years (since GWB's first term). It has steadily gotten worse.

-

the more a child learns about other people and other perspectives, the more they learn to empathize with people who are different from them

This is the core difference between Democrats and Republicans: Democrats respect and value all people, Republicans care only about themselves and despise all others.

-

Anywho, I'm off work today and am headed to the university library to scan a rare book.
posted by neuron at 11:24 AM on September 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Where this ends up is that scene in "Death of Stalin" where they rather desperately need a competent doctor, even passingly so. They realize their own policies (which they all variously waved into motion through malice, ignorance, or apathy) have brought them to a point where no help is available.

After she came to the US, Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva claimed that when Stalin collapsed after an apparent stroke, his aides and subordinates ignored him, and simply stepped over his body as they carried out their duties until he died days later.
posted by jamjam at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

On topic, as a Texan I'm preparing to leave next year. Because fuck this shit. I'm sorry, I lack the willpower and courage to stay in this shithole state.

But, also as a Texan, the departure from the ALA was inevitable. Same as everywhere else since Trump took office, the Republicans here took that as a sign to rip off the mask and ever since then the attacks on libraries, education, and teachers have really accelerated.

My partner was a High School English teacher, she took a pretty steep pay cut to leave the profession. Her district was cutting every book she'd been assigning for her entire career, the school library was closed until the censorship board could strip it of any books they disliked, and they wanted to review her lessons before she would be permitted to teach.

Leaving the ALA is just a prelude, there's going to be mass firing for librarians soon. And the move was towards leaving the ALA years ago.

A bit off topic: Perhaps the liberals whining about the ALA head should take the advice they so condescendingly give anytime a leftist objects to being told to vote for right wing liberals: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
posted by sotonohito at 11:52 AM on September 18, 2023 [30 favorites]

Gerard Bostock:

I understand what you're saying, but it also needs to be said that "centrists" in the library world and elsewhere will absolutely use this logic both to keep progressives and leftists out of positions of authority, block progressive change, and make concessions to the hard right.

It already happened. In early 2017, then-ALA-president Julie Todaro decided that the way for ALA to deal with 45 was to toady to him -- to a man who wanted to eliminate the Institute for Museum and Library Services outright!

Her sucking-up didn't get libraries, archives, or museums jack shit, as you no doubt figured.

I rejoined ALA just to vote for Emily (after leaving it years ago because then-president Michael Gorman turned out to be a racist piece of shit). I'm proud to have voted for Emily and proud to have her leadership.
posted by humbug at 11:56 AM on September 18, 2023 [26 favorites]

Seriously, though, the conflation of ... skinny dipping?! ... with pornography in this guy's mind is just mind-blowing. Heaven forfend children should know that other people are naked under their clothes.

The sexualization of children is one of the most disturbing things about the modern right wing to me. Kids just don't think in those terms until sometime in middle school unless they've been sexually abused. I read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies with actual sexual content as a prepubescent kid. You know what I did? I got bored, so I skipped those parts. From what I've been able to discern in the nearly 40 years since, that's a normal reaction.

Sadly, there seems to be a growing number of people whose minds are pretty much all sex all the time. The whole nudity equals sex thing is not by any means new, but I feel like they're taking it farther than they used to. At the rate we're going showing ankle is going to be seen as indecent exposure before long.
posted by wierdo at 12:11 PM on September 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

Democrats respect and value all people

I do NOT, and I vote Dem in every election. There are lots—tens of millions, in the USA alone—of people who I do not respect nor value. It's just that I make that decision based on their words or actions, not which demographic group they belong to.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:37 PM on September 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

I enjoyed this extended interview with Emily Drabinski from last week. She's really impressive.

I'm always amazed when the right gets away with this shit, because genuinely, people love their local libraries. Even people who don't regularly go to public libraries have warm, fuzzy feelings about them, in my experience. But I'm not sure that matters, because nobody is safe from the right-wing onslaught.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:44 PM on September 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

Kids just don't think in those terms until sometime in middle school unless they've been sexually abuse.

....

Sadly, there seems to be a growing number of people whose minds are pretty much all sex all the time.

Whatever we think the rate of sexual abuse in conservative Christian environments is, the reality is probably much, much worse.
posted by box at 12:58 PM on September 18, 2023 [17 favorites]

Metafilter: I was also being sarcastic.
posted by Flunkie at 1:45 PM on September 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

I think Mr Epigrams and I are staying here in Texas until we die or they run us out, but it's getting harder and harder to fight and lose with some optimism that our kids and grandkids (or in our case niblings and grand-niblings) will be able to build on what we're doing, Between the library book-bannings in both schools and public libraries and all the other stuff (trans-haters, queer-haters in general, Ken Paxton's acquittal, and the general "everything runs on oil money so the oil people dictate everything") it's hard to want to be in Texas, never mind being an actual Texan.

I do think the library thing is part of the broader "sanitization" of spheres for the evangelical Christian types. They've gone from wanting to have their own media, like bowdlerized books and movies plus the whole Christian pop genre, to wanting to force the rest of us to have only the media they approve. This was what they really wanted all along, of course, but they had to take a generation to build up their own media pipeline to make that happen, I guess.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 1:58 PM on September 18, 2023 [13 favorites]

Hey y’all . Let’s all log off PornHub and skateboard down to the library. I heard there’s a salacious text with an allegorical description of what may or may not be oral sex!
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:34 PM on September 18, 2023 [16 favorites]

Hey y’all . Let’s all log off PornHub and skateboard down to the library. I heard there’s a salacious text with an allegorical description of what may or may not be oral sex!

Please tell me it's by John Milton
posted by thivaia at 3:51 PM on September 18, 2023 [12 favorites]

This feels like the predictable and cynical exercise of the same right-wing playback that's been used again and again in the US.

Identify a target not captive to your power base. Wait for an opportunity to foment outrage based on misinterpretation or ideology-justified disapproval of public actions or statements by an individual who is an official part of that target. Use local control of state power structures, which have been rigged to ensure control in perpetuity, to strike back. In public statements, spin these attacks as representing "the will of the people" when in reality it is just the latest assault in a cultural war being run solely to bolster and increase the power of a small right wing faction. Lie about what this is accomplishing and the danger represented by the target to generate some semblance of public support after the fact. Highly publicize any expressions of support or fake them if necessary to give the impression of general agreement from "the right people"
posted by allium cepa at 4:45 PM on September 18, 2023 [11 favorites]

Voting for Emily Drabinski was one of the proudest moments in my two decades of ALA membership.

Same. Emily is a friend. In a "We hang out sometimes" way, not just a "I know her from the internet" way. It may be worth understanding that being president of ALA is a position that you do alongside your regular job. ALA has an actual Executive Director, the very capable and dynamite Tracie Hall, and it's her job to run the organization. I'm actually the Vermont representative to ALA's governing Council and I've been mad about all of this for months now. And that WaPo article was enraging, especially in the way it wrapped up. Many of us know Mr K. His "ALA sexualizes children" refrain has been something he has been saying for, yes, decades, and it wasn't true back then and it's not true now.

In the past many different people have been ALA president (it's a one-year appointment, although there's a past=president and incoming-president hokey pokey so it's three years of service) who have been able to be out and proud about their various identities. Emily happened to show up during a culture war and made a single excited tweet about how her mother was proud of her and also that she's a Marxist lesbian. ALA came out with a letter about how important libraries are, but not about how important Emily is and also not how they had her back and OF COURSE it's okay to be a lesbian. Shame on them and their so-called commitment to intellectual freedom (this is not speaking about Deborah Caldwell-Stone who is a national treasure). I'm leaving ALA again after my term is up.

A few of us got 2300+ people to sign a letter of support for Emily, who think it's okay to talk about who you are. Emily's always been clear about who she is, she's done a lot of very active work with union organizing and academic library work and she's extremely well-versed in queer theory and a nice person to boot. This was just a bunch of people looking for an excuse to mobilize their base with baseless fear mongering. I am very sorry for those of you who are struggling to live in places where those folks have gotten more traction.
posted by jessamyn at 6:20 PM on September 18, 2023 [48 favorites]

Oh wow Emily Drabinski is the prez of ALA? That's fukkin' Awesome!
posted by eustatic at 6:48 PM on September 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Truth. And I should be clear, I think ALA is worth supporting, especially by state associations and libraries for whom it helps raise a lot of money and awareness and provides vital support. But they're having trouble being responsive to this sort of attack at scale, and getting static from nerds like me at the same time as they're trying to handle this really ugly crisis. I think it takes a lot of different kinds of tactics to fight this culture war, I'm just not sure the ones I want to use are the same ones that ALA does.

It's awkward in that the well-organized anti-ALA faction often dips into a lot of online discourse about ALA, so it's hard to talk both publicly and personally about this
posted by jessamyn at 7:53 PM on September 18, 2023 [9 favorites]

I would argue that what we see with the ALA is a national level example of the same thing the Republicans are doing with incredible success at smaller scales: out organizing us.

They don't outnumber us, but they can organize circles around us which is especially humiliating when you consider the buffoonery that characterizes most of the right. The party of Reps Greene and Boebart is OUT ORGANIZING us. Think about that for a minute.

They telegraph what they plan to do for years before they do anything, and yet somehow we're always taken by surprise and on the defense.

Why the heck weren't we organizing to get the Texas Library Association firmly on the side of good rather than just coasting along and pretending the Republicans weren't trying to destroy our libraries?

Answer: the same reason we just coast along and let the Republicans take over so many school boards, city and county governments, etc. Because they organize and fight at a local level, with support and encouragement from the national party, while the Democrats flounder and the national party doesn't seem to give half a shit about anything local.

Example: I got active in my local geriatric club and bridge society, er that is, my local Democratic Party. I'm 48. I was the youngest person there by many decades. And they weren't unwelcoming, but it was a closed group of elderly, wealthy, white people who were perfectly fine running everything exactly as they had been for decades and saw no reason at all why having meetings at 2pm on weekdays would be a bad idea.

I tried to sign up to be a local precinct chair, and the people in charge of that were overjoyed, there hadn't been a chair for my precinct for years! Notice I say I tried? Yeah. They kept meaning to get back to me, but it never happened.

And the local DSA was just the younger edgier version. Lots and lots and lots of droning, endless, boring ass, meetings and but nothing actually happening.

Why do Democrats fail so utterly at organization? I don't know.

But if we don't figure it out pretty soon we're not going to have a country left.
posted by sotonohito at 4:13 AM on September 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpmwhkNg5Dw&ab_channel=Vox

About the Democratic Party being useless, which I hope is relevant-- this an explanation of how Florida turned red. It's not people moving to Florida (not enough of them). It's not Hispanic immigrants from communist countries who loathe anything that seems evenly vaguely communist.

It's that the Democratic Party doesn't even try. The Republican Party runs a lot more Spanish language ads, raises more money, and is generally more active in Florida.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:49 AM on September 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

The lamps are going out all over the fucking place.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:16 AM on September 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Why do Democrats fail so utterly at organization? I don't know.

I do have my gripes about the Democratic party's ... limp response to things like this*, but I wonder how much of it is that it is just much easier for fascists to organize because they are, well, fascists. What I mean is that the left doesn't have the foundation of authoritarianism and hatred that drives people to form groups like Moms for Liberty. We don't have a target.

I think we can change that but I also think it's something we should be aware that we're compensating for. We have to work even harder.

* Like, the example of trying to reach people, e.g. Spanish speakers in Florida. There's a lot of "we don't have to because they already support us" or "it's a lost cause they'll never support us."
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:45 AM on September 19, 2023 [10 favorites]

And the local DSA was just the younger edgier version. Lots and lots and lots of droning, endless, boring ass, meetings and but nothing actually happening.

Yeah, I mean, same. I wanna get involved, but man, where?

I've tried volunteering for political campaigns: never got contacted.

I was involved in local DSA but it full of dramarama grad students who were more interested in play-acting the Russian Revolution than doing, well, anything.

I've been to community meetings and wanted to die when the seventeenth person stood up to complain about parking.

Meanwhile, the right is performatively burning books with a flamethrower and lining up lockstep to support a disgraced former president who's caught multiple charges for trying to overthrow democracy.

I don't know know what to do and the stress of being a queer person in this country is causing endless stress and insomnia. I've been called the f-word more in public in the last year than in the preceding two decades. I'm ready to dip the fuck out of this country.

Honestly, the best I feel is going out and cleaning up litter off my block. It's not going to stop fascism, but at least I'm doing something positive.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:47 AM on September 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

I am personally unsurprised by this. It seems to be in line with the forthcoming rebranding of the Republicans as the “Know-Nothing Party 2.0.” See also, “no such thing as bad publicity.”
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 6:47 AM on September 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

In Iowa, there's a group called Annie's Foundation that seems to be going for being the reverse Moms for Liberty: a group of suburban moms who say that their opposition to book bans is necessary to protect their kids and support families. They've got a Truth About Book Bans toolkit that focuses on school boards and school libraries, because that's where most of the book banning is happening in Iowa right now. So anyway, there may be something similar where you live. If not, consider starting something.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:01 AM on September 19, 2023 [10 favorites]

And it goes without saying that you don't have to be a parent to oppose book bans and attacks on libraries. I'm not a parent. But I do think that framing it that way can be powerful, because the right wing always claims to speak for families, and that's bullshit. The public library system is one of the most family-supportive institutions that exists in the modern US.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:05 AM on September 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

> It's Monday, I'm feeling like crap, and I think America may be over.

I'm Canadian, but for me America - as a political entity I could trust to operate within certain parameters - died on November 8th, 2016. I doubt very much that I'll ever step foot on American soil again, but the flames of hatred Trump continues to fan to this day are creeping north of the border and millions of people here are looking south in envy and anticipation, so before long America may come to me.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:07 AM on September 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Honestly, the authoritarian populist movement is extremely global, and it's not just the US. The book banning bullshit seems to be borrowed wholesale from things Viktor Orban did in Hungary. You could argue that the Modi government's attempts to Hindu-ize the Indian education system provides some of the blueprint for current attempts to introduce Christian nationalist themes in US public schools.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:13 AM on September 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

"I didn't think that 8-year-old was hot until I found out she read part of her aunt's romance novel that one time. Damn books! Taking away our kids' innocence!"

I'm reading a book called Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, by James Kincaid. It's not interested in "how common is this, how bad is this," but "why are these the stories we tell, culturally?" It's not a perfect book--there's one chapter where I thought he got badly off-track--but it's explicitly tracking this phenomenon where we project onto children both innocence and sexuality. His consideration of how those two things operate simultaneously is pretty fascinating to me.
posted by Well I never at 9:56 AM on September 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I heard there’s a salacious text with an allegorical description of what may or may not be oral sex!

Tell me you've been reading Walt Whitman without telling me you've been reading Walt Whitman.
posted by Well I never at 10:14 AM on September 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

OUT ORGANIZING us
I'm active in my local Dem town committee. GOPers are not just out organizing us - they're funded and ruthless and unscrupulous. Dems are still playing by the rules. GOPers have joined with neo-nazis, proud bois, supremacists, the supremely nasty Xtian Right, and, above all, the wealthy. The GOP doesn't disavow any rotten stinking ally. They are excellent at lying. They will do absolutely anything to win. Biden's a street-fighter, but he represented Delaware, a state supported heavily by corporations who are there for preferential treatment. He and every other Dem has to to raise money to get elected; this is the heart of corruption in American politics and why Dems are gutless. They can't afford to be otherwise.

Don't give up. Get involved locally, fight book banning and all the other sordid lies and harm that is being promoted. The GOP is very active in local politics.
posted by theora55 at 10:58 AM on September 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

I spent a good part of yesterday reading the Project2025 handbook, or whatever they call that 925 page roadmap to the destruction of everything good and true in America. If you haven't seen it yet, please do take a look; it's easy to find. If half of what they are planning goes into effect after the next election, assuming a Trump win, there are hardly words for how horrific the outcome will be. I could barely eat all day, with the stress and fear running through me. And I'm a Canadian. For the love of everything holy, the Republicans must not win the next election.
posted by jokeefe at 7:43 PM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Honestly, the best I feel is going out and cleaning up litter off my block. It's not going to stop fascism, but at least I'm doing something positive.

Actually this is a good way to fight fascism. Not picking up litter specifically, but things that concretely benefit the public and attract others to join you. It's basically the first steps toward mutual aid and eventually dual power.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 11:48 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]