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Samantha “Sam” Nestor, Weston’s first selectwoman, is the Democrat nominee for Connecticut’s 26th Senate District, the seat State Senator Ceci Maher is leaving. The district covers Weston, Westport, Wilton, Redding, and parts of Ridgefield, New Canaan, Darien, and Stamford. Nestor beat Rep. Lucy Dathan for the party endorsement in May, and Maher has endorsed her. She faces Republican and Independent candidate Alma Sarelli on November 3.

Maher was a central figure in Connecticut's library fights. With Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, she introduced the “Don’t Ban Library Books Act” and promoted the package that became the Freedom to Read provisions in Public Act 25-168. That law tells school and public libraries they cannot pull material because someone finds the viewpoint offensive, limits who may file a challenge, keeps a book on the shelf during review, and gives librarians immunity plus a civil cause of action if they say they were harassed for doing the job. Maher told critics this was not about pornography. It was about stopping communities from second-guessing “trained professionals.”

Nestor’s answer has been a campaign book club.

The banned-book club is a campaign event

“Sam’s Banned Book Club” is advertised on the “Sam Nestor for State Senate” page. The copy writes itself: “Books are always more fun when someone tries to ban them.” Hosts have included Maher. Locations are private and sent after an RSVP. Selections so far include:

• July 14, Westport: A High Five for Glenn Burke by Phil Bildner, a middle-grade novel about a gay baseball player and acceptance.
• July 28, Westport: New Kid by Jerry Craft, with Craft appearing. Nestor’s recap said the night covered Craft’s experience with challenges in Texas and “Connecticut’s new Freedom to Read Law,” and included State Rep. Dominique Johnson and a former president of the Connecticut Association of School Librarians.
• September 15, Wilton, Maher hosted: People Kill People by Ellen Hopkins, which the campaign described as a novel “about gun violence and white supremacy.” Hopkins was on hand to take questions by Zoom.
• October 10, Weston: The Cardboard Kingdom by Chad Sell, with Sell appearing in person. The campaign post calls it an “imaginative story about kids transforming cardboard boxes into a world of adventure, identity, and acceptance” that “has unfortunately faced challenges and bans in some schools.”

Nestor, a "No Kings" supporter, clearly wants to carry the "banned books" torch for Maher.

The union line, and the books that line actually defends

The National Education Association’s September 24 piece, “The Racist Beginnings of Book Bans,” treats book challenges as the heir of slave-code literacy bans and calls today’s fights an attack on Black, LGBTQ+, and Indigenous voices. The same article’s own list of frequently challenged titles on race and gender starts with Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir that has led American Library Association challenge lists for years; objectors cite illustrated sex acts, including a scene involving a strap-on. All Boys Aren’t Blue is a memoir whose challenged passages include explicit descriptions of underage sexual encounters. The Bluest Eye includes the rape of a child. Parents who have read the pages are not inventing the content. An Ohio librarian quoted in that NEA storyline says objectors “haven’t read the books in their entirety.” Plenty have. They objected to what is on the page.

The NEA frame — that objecting to such content is “anti-intellectualism” — only works if the disputed material is treated as too sacred to describe. It is not.

A related fight already happened in this senate district. School Library Journal reported that Chad Sell was booked to discuss The Cardboard Kingdom in Fairfield Public Schools and that the superintendent canceled the visit after a parent complaint. The book features queer and gender-nonconforming children; Sell is gay. The October 10 book club meeting features Sell in person to talk about the same graphic novel, framed as a book that has “faced challenges and bans in some schools.”

What “freedom to read” already looks like in Nestor's district

State law now makes removal harder, and public school libraries are already stocked with controverisal content.

For example Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor is found in the Darien High School collection, listed for a Grade 10 honors book club. It's also found in Stamford High School and Weston High school.

The novel is a satirical cult story. It is also full of pornographic graffiti the narrator says is scratched into a wall: a faceless naked woman, a severed penis, and lines describing heaven as an “all-you-can-eat p*ssy buffet" and as being “f*cked up the *ss,” plus slurs. That is the actual text of the book. For honor students no less. This is the kind of content Nestor wants students to have the "freadom to read" in school libraries.

The endorsements

The Connecticut AFL-CIO endorsed Nestor, alongside labor endorsements from SEUI 1199NE, Building Trades, 32BJ SEIU, SEIU Local 2001 CSEA and the SEIU Connecticut State Council.

The same labor world has for years bought ads and sent officers to the People’s World Amistad Awards in New Haven, the annual event timed to the founding of the Communist Party USA. Nestor is not accused here of attending the Awards. But she is endorsed by union affiliates that treat the night as a regular stop, and she is running on the library bill unions defended.

In fact, Nestor’s event coordinator is Bob Smoler, a former president of the Fairfield Education Association who once ran for president of the Connecticut Education Association. Smoler has testified on education bills in Hartford, including special-education proposals he warned would disrupt classrooms.

The bottom line

Maher wrote the library shield and got it passed into law, then treated the objections as ignorance. She and Duff cast anyone who opened the books and said no as a threat to democracy, while they cast themselves as the adults defending thought. Nestor is campaigning under that same banner, with Maher and the labor unions beside her, hosting the disputed titles and calling it a moral stand.

The books the NEA holds up as martyrs are some of the most controversial cited by parents. And the book already sitting in a district high school honors collection in Nestor's own district does not need a national "book ban" fight to make the point.

It just needs a reasonable parent who takes a moment to read page 15.

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