A great summing up of the GOP and their nasty nasty nasty war on libraries and what it is to be America.
As one meme that recently popped up on my social media said, “Florida is essentially 1930’s Germany with theme parks”
Why the GOP’s war on books is ripe for cancellation.
Voters filing out of a library in west Michigan last year were proud to show off their “I voted” stickers. Ironically, most of them had just voted to defund the library itself.
The fight against Ottawa County’s Patmos Library began when a conservative group attempted to get an award-winning LGBTQ+ memoir taken off its shelves. When the library refused, the group claimed that, by making this book available, the staff was “grooming” the community’s children. In the end, they were successful: 62 percent of residents voted to slash their funding—and in the aftermath of the vote, the library’s board president said Patmos could be shut down as early as fall of this year.
This is the result of just one battle in the broader Republican war on knowledge, insidiously disguised as a campaign to advocate for parents and protect children.
Right-wing activists have taken over school boards across the country, banning books on topics from slavery to the Holocaust, rejecting courses like AP African American Studies, and prohibiting teachers from discussing gender identity in the classroom. Now, in a comically transparent escalation of this anti-intellectual crusade, they are targeting libraries. Worse, they’ve embraced a characteristically cruel approach to doing so: bullying librarians.
During the campaign to defund Patmos Library, its director—who is gay—resigned after a woman came there, filming with her phone, and called her “that pedophile librarian.” In the last couple of years, multiple states have introduced bills that would criminally charge librarians who let kids check out so-called inappropriate material (that is to say, LGBTQ material.) Last summer, librarians in Montana found five bullet-ridden books in their book drop, and several of them subsequently resigned. These menacing tactics have reached a fever pitch—to the point that in September, PEN America released a tragically necessary tip sheet for librarians facing harassment.
Meanwhile, with Republicans on the offensive, Democrats are failing to mount an effective defense. On the contrary, New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently announced a major cut to the city’s beloved public libraries: over $30 million over the next three years.
Read the full article
