By Chris Powell
What is both most laughable and scariest about the Democratic Party in Connecticut is its hatred for democracy, which came up this week as the state House of Representatives debated the state budget written by the Democratic majority’s caucus.
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To avoid debate on their bill to obstruct challenges to sexually themed, vulgar, and graphic books in public school libraries, the Democrats had tried to hide it in their budget bill. Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a conservative Republican from Killingly, wasn’t fooled. She rose to complain about such books and began quoting sexually vulgar dialogue from one, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” a book that became controversial in Guilford’s school system two years ago.
Deputy House Speaker Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, who was presiding, interrupted Dauphinais and asked her to make her point without words that shouldn’t be used around faint-hearted people and children such as those present in the Hall of the House or watching on television.
If Dauphinais had meant to bait Candelaria, he quickly fell into her trap, making her point for her by trying to shut her up. She replied by noting that the sexual vulgarity she had read aloud and to which Candelaria had objected was the same sexual vulgarity that school librarians in Connecticut were already providing to children of all ages. If this was objectionable in the House, how could it be less objectionable in school?
For years similarly ironic incidents have been happening around the country at school board meetings as parents have objected to sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic books stocked in school libraries. It’s a perfectly fair issue: Exactly what sexual content is appropriate for what ages, and who decides?
Of course there is a big difference between reading silently and reading aloud, as Dauphinais did. But that wasn’t the objection Deputy Speaker Candelaria made. He declared the words objectionable in themselves for young audiences, though Dauphinais had no other effective way of sharing them with the House and the public.
Even so, conservatives should acknowledge that sexual and even racist language may have a place in literature, especially “coming of age” literature for older children.
Indeed, what may be the most moving passage in American literature, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” involves the “N word” even as the character uttering it repudiates racism. Yet some people who consider themselves politically liberal want “Huckleberry Finn” removed from school libraries as much as some conservatives want “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” removed.
The stocking of libraries is a matter of judgment. The issue lately before the General Assembly has been something else: Whether the public should have the right to influence such judgments, either directly or through elected school boards, or whether school librarians should be formally declared unchallengeable experts, answering to no one, as Democrats wanted to arrange with their legislation.
The Democratic bill signified the party’s hatred of democracy. Drunk with arrogance in their one-party state, the Democrats want to stifle political incorrectness everywhere just as Deputy Speaker Candelaria did with Representative Dauphinais.
If democracy is to be sustained in a big federal republic like the United States, some school libraries will stock not just “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” but also homosexuality manuals and paeans to transgenderism, and some won’t. Meanwhile, in another irony missed by Democratic legislators, the biggest censors or “book banners” aren’t people who complain about particular books but librarians themselves.
For librarians have limited space on their shelves while the number of books is practically infinite. So librarians have to choose, and a librarian’s choosing which books to exclude is no different from a parent’s objecting to a sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic book that might get into the hands of a 6-year-old. School and public libraries should answer for their choices.
Librarians may have degrees in library science and may be members of the American Library Association, but, in the end, as George Bernard Shaw said, all professions are conspiracies against the laity — that is, against democracy.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 