Criminalising librarians

Just when you thought America couldn’t get any crazier, on 25 March Louisiana Representative Kellee Dickerson introduced a new bill (House Bill 777), which if passed will make it a criminal offense for librarians to be a member of the American Library Association, writes Gary Dalkin.

Yes, you did read that correctly, the American Library Association, founded in 1876 and as respected (by sane readers) as any other professional organisation in the USA.

This, of course, is all related to the American rightwing’s obsession with book banning – recently Georgia came close to passing a law which would have banned the ALA from all state school and public libraries.

Dickerson’s Bill reads:

A. No public official or employee shall appropriate, allocate, reimburse, or otherwise or in any way expend public funds to or with the American Library Association or its successor.

B. No public employee shall request or receive reimbursement or remuneration in any form for continuing education or for attending a conference if the continuing education or conference was sponsored or conducted, in whole or in part, by the American Library Association or its successor.

C. Whoever violates this Section shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars or be imprisoned, with or without hard labor, for not more than two years, or both.

Or in plain English, any employee of the State of Louisiana who gives or receives money to or from the American Library Association can end up doing two years hard labour. Dickerson has form in this kind of dangerous authoritarianism, having previously helped fund the ironically named Louisiana Freedom Caucus, which last year backed what it considered to be the constitutional right to bear arms without a licence. In other words, semi-automatic rifles, good; books, or at least librarians, bad.