Jeff Bergosh Blog: Escambia County Does NOT have ALA Membership....But we Will Discuss the ALA at our Next Meeting

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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Escambia County Does NOT have ALA Membership....But we Will Discuss the ALA at our Next Meeting

I have received a number of requests from constitutents to have the BCC discuss issues with the American Library Association.

Many constituents want us to drop our membership. I'm told by staff we are not ALA members and we are not spending any money on ALA memberships for librarians, staff, or from the county.

I have asked for the issue to be placed on next Thursday's board agenda for discussion so we can fully inform the public about Escambia's stance on this organization.

I think it a worthy conversation--because as a conservative Republican, a father, a Christian, and a former School Board Member who cares about kids---much of what this organization is doing is of great concern.

I am NOT a book ban guy, nor am I a free speech squelcher.

But everything must be age appropriate---and a lot of youth are being exposed to things that are inappropriate. That's my opinion.

But we will hear from the whole board on this next Thursday.

Here is the email I received on this topic:

"I recently learned that Escambia County has been paying over a thousand dollars in annual membership dues to the American Library Association (ALA) and its state chapter the Florida Library Association (FLA). On behalf of the citizens of Escambia County and the Christian Family Coalition, which has been leading the statewide campaign to defund the ALA, I urge you to join the 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, Charlotte, Flagler, Bay, St. Johns, 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 theRainbow 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 ofDrag Queen Story Hours in libraries for over five years. The ALA’s website devotes anentire page to resources to help librarians plan drag queen story hours to encourage children to explore what they call their "gender fluidity."

The ALA and its defenders claim the growing movement to defund their organization 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 vote to stop paying dues to the ALA and the FLA. Please let me know. In the meantime, we urge the county hold off on any upcoming planned dues payments until this issue is voted on.