09/01/2026
Wasteful spending by local governments has come under increasing scrutiny as Florida homeowners prepare to vote this fall on a proposed state constitutional amendment to significantly reduce their property tax burden.
One area of local government that often includes waste, usually of the woke kind, is the libraries.
In 2023 and 2024, Christian Family Coalition (CFC) Florida led the campaign that convinced 15 library systems in Florida to cancel their dues to the far-left American Library Association (ALA), which is best known for promoting Drag Queen Story Hour.
Now we're lobbying local governments to end their subscriptions to a national library publication allied with the ALA called BookPage.
In the last year, CFC Florida has successfully lobbied four county and city governments to cancel their bulk subscriptions to the book review magazine, which specializes in recommending books that push LGBT, DEI, Critical Race Theory (CRT), anti-Trump and witchcraft themes and that demonize parents who try to shield their children from po*******hy as "book banners."
While not every book recommended by BookPage is overtly political, the books that do have a political bent are invariably left-wing. The magazine never recommends a book by a bestselling conservative author such as Ben Carson, Matt Walsh or Allie Beth Stuckey, and its reviews and interviews with authors drip with scorn and contempt for conservative and Christian values, which are often labeled "transphobic," "racist," and "authoritarian."
Citrus and Hernando counties and the cities of Leesburg and Tavares, all in Central Florida, ended their BookPage subscriptions after being lobbied by CFC Florida representative John Labriola.
Citrus County canceled its BookPage subscription in September 2025, noting that only 38 percent of county library systems in the U.S. have a physical subscription and that the magazine is also available for free online. Hernando County made the decision not to renew BookPage in April 2026, and Leesburg and Tavares did the same this July and August.
BookPage runs a perennial ad produced by Unite Against Book Bans and sponsored by the ALA and BookPage itself. Unite Against Book Bans is an initiative of the American Library Association that fights parents who want to shield their children from pornographic materials in school libraries. In keeping with that theme, BookPage recently published a glowing review of "That Librarian," an autobiographical book by Amanda Jones, a pro-LGBT, pro-trans school librarian who openly defies parents wishing to remove pornographic books from the school, which the review describes as "book bans" that cause kids to kill themselves, an absurd claim with no evidence behind it. In the review, Jones is quoted as militantly stating: "I'll be damned if I'm going to stand in silence while we lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less." The review also complains about Moms for Liberty as a supposedly "far-right" group.
Other book reviews have included "The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet," which reimagines Jane Austen characters as le****ns, a change the reviewer states is "the best and only way to improve upon Austen;" and "Misbehaving at the Crossroads," which not only attacks Donald Trump as "authoritarian" but casts the foundation of the United States as racist, and attacks Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence for "not covering any Indigenous peoples, or White women, or Black folks with the grace of liberty." Other featured books have attacked the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling, which overturned the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that created a federal mandate for abortion on demand; and numerous books, many designated for children, promote homosexuality, transgenderism, witchcraft and even Satanism while condemning America as irredeemably racist, equating police and prisons with slavery and attacking normal Americans as "far right."
Addressing the Citrus County Commission last year, Labriola observed that BookPage has never featured a book review about one of the many books discussing the dangers of transgenderism. The month that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the magazine even had a feature article that aggressively promoted transgender ideology, which has been responsible for so many recent shootings.
“The Charlie Kirk killer, while not transgender himself, was LGBT and dating a transgender, and this is an agenda that’s continuously pushed in this magazine," he said. "You never see the other side."
Unlike most magazines, BookPage is not found on a library rack but is available in large quantities in library lobbies for patrons to take home and keep.
Citrus County had been spending $3,300 a year on the subscription, which paid for 500 copies that were distributed to its five libraries, but larger counties with many libraries spend far more.
So we encourage more county and city governments in Florida that have a subscription to BookPage to cancel it and end this perfect example of woke and wasteful local government spending.
If your county or city library has a BookPage subscription that you would like to see eliminated, let us help by contacting us at [email protected]
