High Marx for libraries

Vice President Kamala Harris took a shot at parents during a speech to the American Federation of Teachers this summer.

“While you teach students about our nation’s past,” Harris told teachers, “these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history.” By “these extremists,” she means Republicans and parents who don’t want their children reading sexualized material.

With antagonists like these, it’s no wonder Republicans visit libraries less frequently than Democrats. Some 30% of Democrats use the library daily, weekly, or monthly, compared to just 17% of Republicans, according to a YouGov poll conducted earlier this year.

“Democrats are almost twice as likely to be monthly library visitors as their Republican friends,” a Washington Post analysis reports . “Southerners, folks 45 or older, Protestants and rural Americans all fall near the bottom of the rankings, and all lean right.”

Democrats and Republicans differ on public library policy, from banning drag queen story hours to subjecting these libraries to obscenity laws. But there’s one thing over 70% of both parties agree on: requiring “public libraries to maintain impartiality toward content and authors.”

Considering the political makeup of librarians, this might be hard for them to do. Librarians constitute a historically deep-blue profession. More than 90% of library directors are Democrats, according to the job data website Zippia.

“Much has been made of the Left’s domination of college and university faculties,” conservative librarian David Durant wrote nearly 20 years ago. “Yet in terms of political composition, the library profession makes your typical Ivy League faculty look like the Heritage Foundation.”

This was before the popularization of drag queen story hours and the great book-banning panic. Over the past couple of decades, the blue-washing of libraries has only gotten worse. Last year, Montana rejected its relationship with the American Library Association after its president described herself as a “Marxist.” Democratic PAC ActBlue facilitates donations to the “entirely nonpartisan” advocacy organization EveryLibrary.

But it’s not just Republicans wary of bias who aren’t taking advantage of library services. “One thing that doesn’t seem to drive most people to libraries? Financial hardship,” the Washington Post shares. “In fact, the higher your income, the more regularly you avail yourself of their free books, spaces and services.”

Access to free books and library services is more essential for those who can’t afford them, yet it’s the middle-to-upper class who are most often taking advantage of these resources. This trend is bipartisan, but it might just have a political takeaway for librarians.

Democrats may see pronoun pins and prominent displays of esoteric racial justice texts as welcoming, but they could just be signals of an in-group of which casual, apolitical librarygoers aren’t a part. This brings to mind the physician who wrote for the Washington Post a few years ago about how asking a man wearing a Trump T-shirt for his pronouns made him clam up. “What do you mean pronouns? Do I look confused to you?” the man said.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

“My intention to be inclusive had backfired,” the medical professional concluded, “and unfortunately not for the first time.”

The fact that Republicans are not frequent librarygoers may not matter so much to Democrats, who see them as Bible-thumping book banners. But putting up a display of a dozen LGBT-related flags and hosting drag queens to read to 3-year-olds may not scream welcoming to those who don’t have Harris yard signs on their manicured lawns. Democrats are right that libraries should strive to maintain impartiality. But do they know what that means?