Alabama’s state library board seems hostile to literacy

In the last few years, Alabama lawmakers have pushed hard to raise the state’s reading scores.

The Legislature approved funding for reading coaches in schools. They established summer camps for students who need to get their reading scores up.

Granted, they also threaten to hold children back if they don’t hit key benchmarks by third grade. Making reading resources available should be enough. But still, the investments have shown enough promise that state education officials want to extend them to older students.

As someone whose paycheck depends on widespread reading, I approve this.

But I’m not sure the people overseeing Alabama’s libraries like it very much. And I think it’s because they’re frightened of literacy.

Literacy is much more than the ability to read. Literacy is what results from repeatedly exercising that skill with a wide range of books. Learning. Empathy. A broader understanding of the world and the people in it.

The Alabama Public Library Service Board does not seem to like that.

I can’t think of another explanation for why the state board keeps dragging members of Fairhope Public Library’s governing board to Montgomery. A handful of belligerent cranks are wasting the library’s time whining about books, mostly those with LGBTQ+ characters in them.

The Alabama Public Library Service considers this a priority.

Board member Amy Minton, who also happens to be running as a Republican state Senate candidate, introduced a resolution over the summer to classify as inappropriate “any material that promotes, engages, or positively depicts transgender procedures, gender ideology, or the concept of more than two biological genders.”

Quick aside: Gender-affirming care leads to better lives for people with gender dysphoria. I’m putting that here in case the state board prevents you from reading it in a library.

But zealots don’t want to have a reasoned discussion about care options and outcomes. They want fear and silence.

Gender ideology is so important that library board members earlier this month decided they would personally review the handful of outstanding complaints about books on Fairhope’s library shelves.

Which brings us to “gender ideology.” And this question: What the heck is “gender ideology?”

Is it affirming the dignity of transgender people? Acknowledging their existence?

Is it showing curiosity about the nature of gender — how much is innate and how much is societal?

Or is it the understanding that people of all genders are inherently equal and deserving of equal opportunities to live their lives as they see fit?

It could be one of those things. It could be all of those things. The Alabama Public Library Service, in constant terror of ambush by fictional LGBTQ+ characters, gets to decide.

And forgive me if I expect the worst possible outcome from that.

Remember that book-banning advocates started in Prattville by conflating books acknowledging the existence of transgender people with sexually explicit material. That was patently false. But it gave Alabama politicians leashed to the far-right the chance to pretend there was a problem where none existed.

And once they got that inch, they went for the mile. Librarians, of all people, must now carry out their duties knowing they could be served up as fuel for the far-right outrage machine.

To its credit, Fairhope fought back. When the board cut the library’s funding, private donors stepped up to support it. City leaders have expressed support for their library. Fairhope voters largely rejected a slate of pro-censorship city council candidates last month.

I hope the rest of the state is paying attention. Fairhope’s fight is a fight for dignity, curiosity and common decency. Three values that the Alabama Public Library Service and many state leaders appear to consider dangerous and illegitimate.

It’s a fight for actual literacy.

Not just the ability to read basic words, take orders and pass a test. But the process of consuming and processing rational ideas. Of encountering new ways of seeing the world and one another.

Some of the hardest work we do is understanding another person. It’s almost impossible without the narratives that books provide. Without broad access to those stories, society becomes static. Hidebound. Hateful.

And sure, teachers need resources to teach kids to read. But we all need libraries where trained professionals can stock diverse, rational and challenging books. Once you start tying their hands, you give Alabamians a limited, counterfeit version of reality.

It’s like restricting a musician to performances in C major. Or ordering a painter to use a single color palette. Or requiring football teams to run just three plays. You’re cutting off a world of possibility.

That’s what our state library board is trying to do. Make sure that children growing into reading get a stunted and deeply prejudiced view of the world. Where the only aspirations are conformity and obedience.

And that’s the opposite of literacy.