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We recently learned through a public records request (attached) that Semiole County has been paying over $3,500 in combined annual organizational and staff dues to the radical American Library Association (ALA) and its state chapter the Florida Library Association. The ALA has become notorious for promoting Drag Queen Story Hours and explicit LGBT materials to children nationwide. Its current president is a self-proclaimed "Marxist lesbian" who has called for "queering the catalog" and has said libraries "need to be a site of socialist organizing."

WE HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO STOP THIS, BUT WE NEED PEOPLE TO EMAIL COMMISSIONERS and also attend the Seminole County Commission meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 12 to speak during Public Comment to urge commissioners to DEFUND THE ALA and its state chapter, the Florida Library Association.  

 

The meeting will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 1:30 p.m. (with the opportunity for Public Comment coming at the end of the meeting just before adjournment) at the Seminole County Services Building, 1101 E. First Street in Sanford, FL 32771. The Public Input period is at the end of the meeting just before adjournment. Please be there if you can, and use any part of the email message below as your Talking Points.

 

ALSO, please email the message below TODAY to the commission at the email addresses listed. Remember to sign your name at the bottom of the message.

 

Bob Dallari <[email protected]>,
Jay Zembower <[email protected]>,
Lee Constantine <[email protected]>,
Amy Lockhart <prawlings@seminolecountyfl.gov>,
Andrea Herr <[email protected]>

 

 

Dear Commissioners, 

 

I recently learned that Seminole County has been paying over $3,500 in annual membership dues to the radical American Library Association (ALA) and its state chapter the Florida Library Association (FLA). I urge you to have our county join the growing number of counties around the state that have terminated their memberships in the ALA, including Citrus, Hernando, Collier, Lee, Sarasota, Pasco, Santa Rosa, Lake, St. Lucie, Manatee and Hillsborough counties.

 

The ALA has become notorious for its aggressive promotion of "Drag Queen Story Hours" and sexually explicit LGBT materials targeting children, along with other leftist ideological agendas.  

The ALA's current president is self-proclaimed "Marxist lesbian" Emily Drabinski, who has said libraries "need to be a site of socialist organizing" and has used her position to champion the "queering" of public libraries.

But the ALA’s radical agenda of sexualizing children goes back years before Drabinski’s presidency. Over a decade ago, the ALA started the Rainbow Project Book List. This recommended reading list for children aggressively pushes alternative sexual lifestyles and "gender fluidity" themes on children as young as 3 months old, with titles such as Two Grooms on a Cake for ages 6 to 9; The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope for ages 4 to 8, which celebrates transgenderism in children; and Bye Bye Binary, for ages 3 months to 4 years, which encourages "dismantling gender norms" from infancy.

The ALA has used its influence to promote books that not only push gender ideology indoctrination on children, but outright pornographic content. The ALA’s so-called “Banned Books List” celebrates these pornographic books by pushing the narrative that efforts to keep them away from children and out of school libraries are a form of censorship that must be resisted. The ALA actually encourages libraries during so-called "Banned Books Week" to promote these books on posters and conspicuously placed display cases in public and school libraries to encourage children to check them out. These books include Gender Queer, which includes graphic depictions of teens engaging in oral sex; Lawn Boy, which depicts sex between men and children; and Beyond Magenta, which includes a graphic description of a 6-year-old performing oral sex on multiple men. The ALA coaches librarians to push back on parents who object to these pornographic materials being made available to their children by casting them as villains and “book banners.” Drabinski's designated successor as ALA president, Cindy Hohl, who will start her term in July 2024, can be expected to aggressively carry on this insidious agenda given the fact that she is the current treasurer of the "Freedom to Read Foundation," which is behind the "Banned Books List" promoting these pornographic materials to children.

The ALA has been encouraging the expansion of Drag Queen Story Hours in libraries for over five years. The ALA’s website devotes an entire page to resources to help librarians plan drag queen story hours to encourage children to explore what they call their "gender fluidity."

 

The other side will claim this is about censorship, but it's the ALA that's doing the censoring. Sen. Marco Rubio has rightly called for ending all government funding to the ALA and conducting an investigation into its efforts to censor and discriminate against Christian author and actor Kirk Cameron and his publisher Brave Books. When Cameron attempted to organize a national family-friendly story hour on Aug. 5 in libraries across the country, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, coached librarians on how to “invent programming” for that day so library reading rooms would not be available for the event.

 

The Florida Department of State's Division of Library & Information Services recently announced it will not accept any grants with project activities associated with the ALA or its state chapter the Florida Library Association. Several other state libraries and counties outside of Florida also have severed ties with the ALA, including the Montana, Texas, Missouri, and South Carolina state libraries. 

You can find several articles with more information about the ALA's radical agenda and its Marxist president here, here, here, and here. 

 

By terminating dues membership in the ALA and its state chapter the Florida Library Association, our county will be sending a strong message that it is standing up to this radical and corrupt organization while adding momentum to the movement to defund the ALA across the state of Florida and the United States. 

 

I hope we can count on your support to stop paying dues to the ALA and the FLA. Please let me know. In the meantime, we would ask that the county hold off on any upcoming planned dues payments until this issue is voted on. 

 

Thank you, and I look forward to your response!