A large organization that drives the training of U.S. librarians and their use of public funds has chosen a self-described “Marxist lesbian” as its next president amid growing concern about libraries actively connecting children to sexually explicit activities and materials.
Emily Drabinski was elected president of the American Library Association last week by the organization’s members. She will take office in July 2023.
ALA’s approximately 54,000 members include librarians, libraries, library graduate schools, members of library boards and associations, and library students. The vast majority of its membership fees, therefore, are provided by taxpayer funds.
Drabinski won with 5,410 votes from such an electorate, compared to her opponent’s 4,622 votes, according to an ALA press release. The election was conducted online.
The interim chief librarian of The Graduate Center at City University of New York (CUNY), where she was previously the “critical pedagogy librarian,” Drabinski posts openly on her Twitter feed in support of sexually exposing children, union-led political strife, socialist politicians, and libraries pushing explicit and far-left material on unwilling taxpayers.
On a personal web page, Drabinski touted multiple endorsements from labor and LGBT activists in her bid for the ALA presidency, including from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union.
“I so value Emily’s work in intentionally bringing a class, labor, and queer consciousness to her efforts as an anti-racist ally,” wrote fellow ALA member April M. Hathcock in a public endorsement of Drabinski.
For more than a century, labor unions have often functioned as a recruiting and muscle operation for the Communist Party and its fellow travelers and shell operations.
In a TV interview with a Boise station last week about her ALA election, Drabinski conveyed surprise at public concerns about libraries making pornographic materials available to children and buying them with taxpayer resources.
“It’s like concerted political efforts to sort of push this, sort of story about what libraries do which seems very, you know, it’s anathema to what libraries actually do, that we are, sort of pushing pornographic materials on our patrons and it’s really not what we do at all,” she claimed. “…There’s no big library agenda.”
Contrary to her claims in that interview, however, Drabinski’s other YouTube videos are replete with teaching other librarians how to “subvert” and inject hard-left politics and sexuality into their publicly funded work. For one example, consider one of many such lectures she gave to other librarians on July 6, 2021, titled “Teaching the Radical Catalog.”
In the lecture, Drabinski discussed her homosexual coming out experience and how saturating in a campus environment of proliferating sexual identities changed how she approaches being a librarian. At her first librarian job, “At Sarah Lawrence, absolutely everybody was queer. … There were so many ways to be gay. … And it was my job to teach those students how to find themselves in our library catalog,” she said. She described queering the library as “critical thinking” and “thinking critically about the catalog.”
Here’s a slide from that presentation showing the sexuality sections of the Library of Congress catalog. In it, you can see the Closed Captioning of what Drabinski is saying while showing the slide, which includes affirming the idea that “queerness includes the subversion of those kinds of normal family types.” She’s referring to the family types that naturally produce children — i.e. a married man and woman.
In the rest of the presentation, Drabinski went on to teach librarians how to change how visitors find books about sex, contradicting her claims to the Boise reporter that librarians don’t work to get sexual material into patrons’ hands. This very effort has been a part of Drabinski’s public professional work for decades, by her own public attestation.
“We can equip our students with the capacity to wring what they need out of library structures, and wringing what you need out of systems that exclude you is a necessary life skill for survival and revolution,” she concluded in her talk. “And we can also help build a way of shaping students as agents of change both inside the library and out.”
So while Drabinski tells the general public that librarians aren’t trying to help minors access pornography, by her own admission elsewhere that’s exactly what she has focused her professional career on doing, with taxpayer resources. In their endorsements, fellow ALA members and leaders said, as did “former ALA Council member” Jenna Freedman, that Drabinski’s professional “accomplishments” include “queering the landscape of library publishing and scholarship.”
This is supported by her Google Scholar page, which ranks Drabinski’s 2013 article “Queering the Catalog” as her top-cited work. In that article, she notes “the first program of ALA’s Task Force on Gay Liberation was called Sex and the Single Cataloger, a session about the trouble with headings for gay and lesbian materials.”
That ALA task force was founded in 1970, and was the first formally organized professional U.S. organization to push LGBT preferences. That task force now annually presents the Stonewall Awards for LGBT-themed books. Such recommendations are essentially “buy list” excuses for public libraries that ensure major taxpayer subsidies for often obscene, and what would otherwise be mostly obscure, books that few people ever saw or requested from libraries.
In the 2013 article, again flatly contradicting her representations to the Boise TV station, Drabinski developed a “strategy [that] suggests the possibility of a queer library politics.”
“Queer theory provides a useful theoretical frame for rethinking the stable, fixed categories and systems of naming that characterize library organization schemes and strategies for helping users navigate them,” Drabinski wrote. She essentially explained “queer theory” as the rejection of the existence of truth, either in language or in anything: “Viewing cataloging and classification from a queer perspective [is] — one that challenges the idea that classification and subject language can ever be corrected once and for all.” She argued that since gender identities are fluid, so must be library classification systems and stacks.
This is a rejection of Western thought and civilization, which is built on the search for truth. A search for truth presupposes that truth exists and can be at least partially known. This also implies the world has an intrinsic, natural order that can, and indeed must, be acknowledged (i.e., the natural law). So it’s no surprise that a woman who opposes truth, and instead deifies self-created and unnatural identities, calls herself a Marxist.
Whether in its predominantly economic or cultural forms (which, as they say, intersect), Marxists are committed to overthrowing the West, including all of its organizing ideas and accomplishments. In addition to lies and deception, Marxists use sexual chaos as a deliberate strategy of cultural destruction. The “queer theory” in which Drabinski specializes openly aims to destroy the West by destroying the natural family, natural sex, natural relationships between the sexes and the children those sexes produce only heterosexually, natural distinctions, natural hierarchies, and order itself.
The United States, especially in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that gave this great nation its birth, is the chief modern example of Western achievement. Its achievements are precisely in recognizing and attempting to adhere to the natural order as closely as possible. And now those who hold the keys to its so-called institutions of learning use their positions and resources to erase truth and the natural law, which are the very foundation of Western society.
Like other Marxists, Drabinski also makes politically exclusionary statements that show she doesn’t approach non-leftists with good faith, instead desiring to wage political war against people who disagree with her with whatever resources she can muster.
For example, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in December 2019, Drabinski wrote, “The [political] right is interested in maintaining the status quo, preserving white supremacy and the continuing consolidation of wealth into their hands and no one else’s. … Like the United States itself, the right is enriched by capitalism, racism, and patriarchy.”
On that issue, at least, she was willing to tip her hand to the very accomodating Boise journalist: “I think we have legacies of racism to undo,” she commented while on another subject. To her, however, as to so many others now atop our commanding heights, dismantling “racism” means “dismantling America.” One pervy picture book and publicly funded twerk at a time.
