By Mark Glennon of Wirepoints
A far bigger problem has now become apparent in Illinois’ new “ban on book bans” since we criticized it last month: This month, a self-described Marxist took the helm as president of the American Library Association. If ALA chooses to amend its own rules about book selection to align with her Marxism, Illinois law would automatically change with it.
That’s because Illinois outsourced its legislative power over book selection and censorship to the American Library Association under the bill signed by Gov. JB Pritzker last month. Illinois libraries, as we explained earlier, now face forfeiture of state grants unless they either adopt the American Library Association’s library bill of rights or develop a written statement of their own prohibiting the practice of banning books and other materials.
The second option is impossibly vague as written in the new statute, as we wrote, which makes adoption of the ALA’s rules a simpler and likelier option for libraries to take. But there’s nothing stopping the ALA from changing its its bill of rights however it wants, which could well be in a radically left direction.
The new ALA president is Emily Drabinski. Recently, she described herself as a “Marxist lesbian.” She did not walk back that description when asked about it recently, as reported here.
In her home state of Montana, the State Library Commission already responded, voting to cut all ties with the ALA. “Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” the commission wrote in a letter to the ALA.
Her sexual preference is not the issue. We care absolutely nothing about that.
But her extremism is a different matter and delegation of legislative power to a group run by a Marxist is intolerable.
That extremism is described in detail by The Federalist. “Queering the landscape of library publishing and scholarship” through taxpayer-funded libraries is central to Drabinski’s accomplishments. That particular accomplishment was widely cited by supporters in her ALA election, according to The Federalist, which also wrote that Drabinski’s videos “are replete with teaching other librarians how to ‘subvert’ and inject hard-left politics and sexuality into their publicly funded work.”
Radical extremism is apparently replete in the rest of the ALA as well, as both The Federalist and New York Post described. But some librarians are fed up with the ALA’s radical atmosphere, says the Post. It quoted one librarian who said, “It’s all about the ALA here. Librarians are some of the most dangerous people in society. They are very well-organized and they communicate very well. Libraries are lost. They are rotten to the core. So much money has been dumped into them by organizations with agendas.”
Delegating legislative power to an outside association, as Illinois did, was wrongful to begin with, being what courts should view as a violation of what’s known as the “nondelegation doctrine.”
What’s most astonishing and terrifying, however, is that the state saw fit to outsource its power over something as important to public discourse as book bans, and to outsource it to an organization so radical that it could choose Marxist leadership.
Marxism is explicitly hostile to the most sacred principles of an open society and a democratic republic. America and most of the West, for decades, stood resolute against its expansion, repulsed by its notions of one-party rule, prohibitions of free speech and contempt for democratic process. Is there no bottom to the madness into which we have sunk?
