NAPLES, Florida (LifeSiteNews) – Another Florida county has cut ties with the American Library Association (ALA) over its radical leftist president and support of making sexually explicit and ideologically controversial books available to children, three months ahead of the relationship’s scheduled expiration.
Florida’s Voice reported that the Collier Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to terminate the Collier County Public Library system’s annual membership with the ALA, citing the public attention that has been drawn in recent weeks to the organization’s latest president, Emily Drabinski, who has said it is “really important to me” that she is a “Marxist lesbian,” and its stance on children’s access to sexual content.
One speaker to address the board, Jamie Merchant, brought up Drabinski’s association with the so-called Freedom to Read Foundation (FRF), which is associated with the ALA and identifies as one of its core purposes “[s]afeguarding libraries’ right to disseminate all materials contained in their collections.”
The FRF “celebrates sexually explicit LGBT books targeting children by pushing the narrative that efforts to keep them off school library shelves are a form of censorship that should be resisted,” Merchant said.
The ALA’s Library Bill of Rights says books and other materials in libraries “should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation” or “because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval” and that a “person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views,” without any means of restricting access to certain material on the basis of “chronological age.”
The Voice noted that in January the ALA-backed “Rainbow Roundtable” released a list of recommended books containing multiple titles intended to promote gender fluidity to children, including a book on preferred pronouns listed for ages three and below.
The inculcation of gender fluidity and the rest of LGBT orthodoxy among the youth in public schools and libraries has been a longstanding concern, from school libraries to sports team and restroom policy to drag events to ideological classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input.
Florida under Republican Governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has taken a leading role against this trend, with numerous actions to prohibit critical race theory and age-inappropriate sexual discussions from classrooms, reorient public education toward more classical civics standards, and help elect like-minded conservatives to local school boards, as well as force compliance with state standards such as keeping restrooms sex specific.
Collier County is one of several Florida counties to rebuke the ALA so far, preceded by Citrus County and Hernando County.