This is an opinion column.

Libraries are under assault. In Prattville and Huntsville and Ozark and Shelby County and all over.

They’re coming for your library, too. I promise they are.

Ozark Mayor Mark Blankenship is the latest. He has demanded the Ozark-Dale County Library remove books with LGBTQ content from the young adult section. He took to social media over the weekend after librarians – librarians are angels, if you do not know – did not rush to kiss his ring.

“We have been trying to remove this trash from the kids section of our library for several months,” the mayor posted on Facebook.

Blankenship urged people to ask city and county officials to punish the libraries. The library board called a special meeting for Wednesday to deal with it.

“If we cut the funding they will be closed and our children will not be exposed to this mess,” he wrote.

Of course Blankenship followed that post up with some God.

“And do not tell me that the Lord’s word is flawed by man,” he posted. “In reality it is more reliable today than ever due to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His word is perfect and can be trusted.”

OK. He’s a theologian, too. Lots of them out there these days.

Intolerance in the name of religion is pushing the effort to purge libraries. Kay Kelley, a board member for the North Shelby Library District, saw it when groups protested a small gay pride month display at the library in June. Protesters there boldly claimed to speak for God.

Kelley described an exchange with one such woman:

“I said ‘I understand you can control what your children read, but you cannot control what (someone else) lets her children read.’”

The woman disagreed.

“She said, ‘Yes, I can, because God has told me to.’”

“It all reverts back to religion,” Kelley said. “We had people who said, ‘We don’t care what the First Amendment says, because our job in this world is to make sure everyone goes to heaven.’ It’s all religion.”

Not religious freedom. Just my-way-or-highway-to-hell religion. Taliban stuff.

It’s nuts that this purging movement is sweeping this state and the country. It’s horrifying how it is modeled after Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based group that has grown to mammoth proportions by co-opting the name of liberty itself.

Those moms and their followers should read William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, with the immortal words of Inigo Montoya:

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Or maybe they should just start with the dictionary, unless they find Merriam-Webster somehow offensive.

That book defines liberty in these ways:

A: the quality or state of being free.

B: the power to do as one pleases.

C: freedom from physical restraint.

D: freedom from arbitrary or despotic control.

E: the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges.

F: the power of choice.

Not a single word about barring others from reading things that scare you. It is not about limiting thought. It is not about thinking you alone are right, regardless of what the Dead Sea Scrolls may or may not prove.

Inconceivable.

It is fitting, I suppose, that would-be censors are rightly represented as the bad guys in literature and cinema throughout history. Fahrenheit 451. 1984. Harry Potter. Footloose. All the greats.

Of course they hate it.

But it’s not funny. Because these groups are coming for your thoughts.

Librarians across this country work under guidelines to support the intellectual freedom of everybody in the community.

Their boards are supposed to be there to defend that freedom. And now they find themselves under assault from pandering politicians, from people who have never set foot in their libraries before, and from wound-up protestors who call them godless groomers for stocking books.

It’s time to take a stand for libraries, and librarians. Tell your public officials to stand for the liberation of ideas, for intellectual freedom. For real liberty.

Because they’ll be coming. To a library near you.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.