Scott McIntosh: Idaho’s far-right Republicans tilting at windmills over American Library Association

Idaho’s far-right is shooting first, asking questions later.

The Idaho Freedom Caucus, a coalition of 13 extremist Idaho legislators, called for the Idaho Commission for Libraries to “immediately” withdraw from the American Library Association.

The legislators are concerned about Emily Drabinski, the president of the American Library Association, who tweeted that she’s a “Marxist lesbian.” The tweet has since been deleted, though Drabinski says her tweets auto-delete.

The Montana State Library Commission has since canceled its membership with the American Library Association.

It’s the far right’s version of “cancel culture,” which they so often deride when the other side does it.

There’s one big problem: The Idaho Commission for Libraries doesn’t belong to the American Library Association, nor does it receive funds from them, according to reporting by the Idaho Statesman’s Ryan Suppe.

It’s yet another example of the far right tilting at windmills and looking for problems that don’t exist.

The American Library Association is a private, nonprofit organization that promotes libraries and offers training for librarians. Anyone can be a member, something known as freedom of association.

The Idaho Freedom Caucus came out with its statement right around the time the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a right-wing lobbying organization, came out with its own call to cut ties with the American Library Association.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the Idaho Freedom Caucus’ use of McCarthyite scare tactics about communism meshes with the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s recent celebration of Sen. Joe McCarthy as part of its “Pride in America” series of so-called great Americans, a list that also included the likes of Robert E. Lee and Randy Weaver.

The legislators claim the American Library Association is “Marxist-led.” Anyone who understands anything about Marxism understands how far removed the United States is from Marxism. It’s a preposterous suggestion that the United States is anywhere close to a system in which the workers take over the means of production – farms and factories – and all property is publicly owned.

Further, the organization isn’t “Marxist-led.” Whatever the political persuasion of Drabinski (who describes herself as a socialist), the American Library Association is governed by an elected council, which is its policy-making body, and an executive board, which acts for the council in the administration of established policies and programs, according to the ALA website.

Drabinski is the elected president of the board, one among 15 members.

But the suggestion really is that Drabinski’s presidency of the American Library Association is proof-positive of what they’ve suspected all along: that the Marxists are trying to take over the United States, and they’re doing it by getting gay literature into the libraries to turn kids gay so that we’ll have no more “traditional” families, leading to the inevitable destruction of America.

In their statement, the Idaho legislators railed against “the Marxist’s objective, seeking to undermine the West by eradicating the traditional family, natural sexual relationships, distinctions between sexes, and the orderly structures that accompany them.”

It makes one wonder how fragile they must consider human sexuality that they fear a book can turn your kid gay.

Indeed, that’s the focus of their constant ire: that books about the LGBTQ community can be found in libraries. They mask their objections in claims of “pornography” and “graphic sex descriptions.”

In reality, it’s an attack on a marginalized group of people, people who would like to go to their local library and sometimes see themselves represented in the books on the shelves. Or, heaven forbid, books are available that teach its readers about people who have different lived experiences.

And it’s another attack on libraries, which simply seek to educate and inform, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The real goal of these far-right attacks is to erase a group of people, pretend they don’t exist, and keep their stories off the shelves.

Or maybe they’re just attacking yet another public institution, much the way they attack public education.

Either way, their attacks would be laughable – if they weren’t so dangerous.