For a while there, the GOP was trying very hard to rebrand as the pro–free speech party. After spending decades crying “immoral” entertainment in public media and justifying the rollback of civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism while wagging their fingers at Americans about what they could say, do, post, and enjoy, Republican politicians suddenly were up in arms about college campus protests, cancel culture, and tech censorship (though, strangely, only when it affected the particular speech they care about).

Yet with every passing month of the party’s renewed crusade against LGBTQ people, it seems clearer and clearer that the GOP is resetting to the censorious and often sex-obsessed morality police it was known as for most of the last century. As proof, look no further than what now seems a national campaign by ultraconservative state-level Republicans against the American Library Association (ALA) and its new president.

The opening salvo came two weeks ago, when appointees made to the Montana State Library Commission by Gov. Greg Gianforte — a homophobic tech billionaire who thinks retirement doesn’t make sense because the Bible says Noah was six hundred years old — voted to withdraw the state library from the ALA.