A Vulgar Non-Debate

“Children’s Committee ranking member Rep. Anne Dauphinais, R-Killingly, read excerpts from books she said can be found in Connecticut school libraries,” according to a story in CTMirror.

Decorous Democrats in the state House objected to the selected texts read by Dauphinais as being vulgar, and CTMirror began its story with a terse warning: “Editor’s note: This story contains graphic sexual language that some readers might find offensive.”

Dauphinais’ chief objection was that Democrat legislative overseers had prevented a robust debate on a library bill she thought should not have been smuggled inside an implementer bill, a strategy often used to sidestep robust and clarifying public debate.

“Under the legislation, which passed the House early Tuesday morning as part of the biennial budget,” CTMirror tells us, “school boards and library governing bodies would be required to create a policy for considering requests to ban books, and they would not be allowed to exclude a book solely because someone in a local community finds it offensive.

“Those governing bodies would not be able to prohibit a book based on the background or viewpoints of the book or its author, and their policies would have to protect against discrimination based on race, religion or sexual orientation, among other provisions.

“Lawmakers who have advocated for the bill say these requirements would protect librarians from harassment and prevent small-scale fights that can lead to more widespread censorship in communities. They argue that most books that have historically been banned are about historically marginalized groups and that people have a choice when they walk into a library about which books they read and which they leave on the shelf.”

Asked about the curtailed debate, CTMirror tells us, Republican “House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said including provisions about libraries in the bill was disrespectful. ‘I know that the Democrats felt that that might have been disrespectful,’ Candelora said of the sexually explicit language used by Dauphinais. ‘What was disrespectful was to have a budget bill that had a lot of policies that went well beyond the budget, and one of them being how libraries are going to be governed now.’”

Dauphinais’ textual citations of morally offensive books available in student libraries were, state Democrat leaders said, indecorous, an offense to traditional state House decorum. “But Dauphinais said on Tuesday,” according to the CTMirror story, “that she believed the public deserves to know what kinds of books are in school libraries and how the bill would create rules that take away unilateral local control of their books and policies.

“’Perhaps they wouldn’t put these sorts of bills in the budget so we could have a really good qualified debate on the House floor with regard to the contents of the bill,’ Dauphinais said. ‘They should be appalled that they’re in children’s libraries in schools, not appalled that I said it on the House floor.’”

Put on their oaths, many parents might agree with Dauphinais. Nearby all the Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly who objected to the reading of vulgar texts on the House floor likely graduated from what used to be called grammar school decades before the current crop of elementary school children. Members of the state General Assembly are, after all, adults.

It would be far better if recent graduates from Connecticut’s intercity schools were to be taught grammar rather than vulgar texts supplied to children by vulgar authors, and it is morally jarring to be told that a text made available in school libraries to young children is inappropriate for adult legislators. Most parents of young school children probably would agree that Winnie the Pooh might be a more appropriate text for young children than Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, cited by Dauphinais.

CTMirror provides the citations: “’Have you ever given Logan a blow job,’ she [Dauphinais] read from ‘l8r, g8r,’ a coming-of-age story about friendship told in the form of instant messages between teenagers… ‘Are you gonna eat her pussy,’ Dauphinais continued, this time reading from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a novel written from the perspective of a socially awkward teenager who befriends a girl with cancer.”

At this point in the reading, Deputy Speaker Juan Candelaria, a Democrat presiding over the House, banged the gavel and asked Dauphinais to stop “out of respect for others that might get offended.”

Dauphinais responded, “You’re telling me that this language isn’t appropriate in this chamber. This is in elementary school libraries.”

Not to worry though: Young people exposed to morally offensive texts will be spared any further accurate citations of the objectionable texts in the legislature -- because state Democrats have preserved the library bill from honest and open public debate by closeting it in a last minute implementer bill only cursorily read by legislators before they depart the state capitol and reacquaint themselves with their wives and children.