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The Republican Party in Connecticut has been for years a voice crying in a wilderness of neo-progressive legislators. The state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation is wholly Democrat, the last Republican U.S. Representative, Chris Shays, having departed the scene in 2009. Democrat voters outnumber Republicans by a rough ratio of two to one; there are slightly more unaffiliated than Democrats in the state, and the state’s cities have been Democrat for about a half century.
The voice, fiscally conservative, has lately turned some heads, although the Republican contingent in the General Assembly has in the past been consistently liberal on social issues. This writer has made a sharp distinction between policies that are “liberal” and those that are “neo-progressive.” President John F. Kennedy was a liberal, as was Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso. Neo-progressivism is a mixture of Gramsci Marxism and the traditional liberalism of Kennedy and Grasso, both of whom might have elbowed quasi socialists such as Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders towards the exit signs.
Victory in politics lies in sharp distinctions. Given the political demographics in Connecticut, the failure to draw distinctions has led to the robotic ascendancy of Democrats. In the past, Democrats have been coy on social issues – no longer. Lacking a compensating cultural push to the right, Connecticut Republicans have ceded to Democrats the superintendence of important cultural issues such as we now see emerging in our public school system.
The very first political question is – who decides? The U.S. Constitution addresses itself to this question much of the time, but it is silent on many important issues.
Who should control the moral direction of children in schools, parents through responsive municipal school boards, or Connecticut’s overweening and, in some instances, morally relativistic state education department and its soon to be obsolescent – one hopes -- federal offshoot?
Why shouldn’t schools be directed by municipal bodies much closer to students and their parents than remote, partisan DC overseers? The US Department of Education in 2023 employed 4,147 workers drawing a median salary of $138,150. Some conservatives want to jettison the whole 40-year-old department.
If the U.S. Department of Education were to disappear tomorrow, decision-making affecting education would simply revert to states and municipalities, both of which presently bear the brunt of decisions made in Washington. The real-world consequences of such decisions are far removed from the people affected. Fifty states engaging in pilot pedagogical projects would be far more responsive, creative, and democratic than broadly enforced autocratic decisions and projects made in Washington D.C. by an agency that receives its marching orders from national politicians.
This dislocation of democratic decision-making and the wall-eyed morality of elite pedagogues are causing tectonic eruptions in public meetings on education all across Connecticut.
Some of the eruptions are focused on what parents consider graphic, morally offensive books the contents of which cannot be printed in scores of commentary pieces defending the accessibility of such books as Flamer, by Mike Curato, and Blankets, by Craig Thompson in libraries frequented by elementary school children.
It should be a simple rule of thumb that if you cannot quote in editorial pages without excisions significant portions of a book that fixates on aberrant sexual activity, the book probably should be kept from the eyes of K-8 school children. A modicum of modesty would suggest as much.
To quiet a public outcry against such books, powerful Connecticut Democrats have introduced a bill titled the “Don’t Ban Library Books Act.” The full title of SENATE BILL 523 -- sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, and Sen. Ceci Maher, a Wilton Democrat who co-chairs the General Assembly’s Children’s Committee -- is: “AN ACT CONCERNING THE CURATION AND RETENTION OF LITERARY MATERIALS CONTAINED IN PUBLIC AND SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND LEGAL PROTECTIONS AFFORDED TO LIBRARIANS AND STAFF WORKING IN SUCH LIBRARIES.”
The bill provides: “That the general statutes be amended to (1) prohibit public and school libraries from excluding or censoring books because of the origin, background or views of the material or of its authors, or solely because a person finds such books offensive; (2) require local school boards and the governing bodies of public libraries to set up policies for book curation and the removal of library materials, including a way to address concerns over certain items; (3) provide a librarian and other library staff member with immunity from criminal and civil liability arising from good faith actions performed pursuant to state law; and (4) provide a civil cause of action to a librarian and other library staff member for emotional distress, defamation, libel, slander, damage to reputation or any other relevant tort, against any person who harasses a librarian or library staff member from compliance with state law.”
Any self-respecting “pragmatist” – Democrat Speaker of the House Matt Ritter marches under that banner – could not help but notice that Duff’s bill is heavily weighted against the kind of eruptions that have frequently occurred in school board meetings across the state when Flamer and Blankets are forced down the throats of vulnerable school children and their astonished parents.
Those who favor the placement of such books in libraries available to elementary school children are provided with “immunity from criminal and civil prosecution,” and the bill also allows a “a civil cause of action to a librarian and other library staff member for emotional distress, defamation, libel, slander, damage to reputation or any other relevant tort, against any person who harasses a librarian or library staff member from compliance with state law” -- that is, with the bill proposed by Duff.
“We named this bill the ‘Don’t Ban Library Books Act’ because it defends critical thinking, the right to access information, and the professionals who make libraries the centers of learning and growth in our communities,” Duff said.
Duff feels that if the two books mentioned above were to be removed from the library stacks that service K-8 children, groups such as Moms for Liberty might call for the re-banning of Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn – a bit of a stretch there.
Parents of young school children consulting with teachers, principals of schools and their own moral certitudes – not state officials or librarians – should be the arbiters of books permitted to be viewed by young and innocent children.
Two Republicans – Representatives Anne Dauphinais and Gale Mastrofrancesco – have proposed a bill titled “An Act Prohibiting the Availability of Sexually Explicit Material in Public School Libraries” that provides “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Assembly convened: That the general statutes be amended to require that public school libraries prevent minors from access to any material that depicts (1) pornography, (2) sexually explicit conduct, (3) touching a person's clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if such person is a female, breast, (4) a nude performance, (5) a person in a state of sexual excitement, or (6) sado-masochistic abuse or masturbation -- Statement of Purpose: To prevent student access to sexually explicit material in public school libraries.”
Proposed Bill No. 5898, a majority of wide-awake parents may agree, will align school curricula with the commonly accepted moral features of the Connecticut public represented by the state legislature.
