Editor’s note: This story contains graphic sexual language that some readers might find offensive. 

This story has been updated.

Debate on the biennial budget devolved into a culture war discussion about book banning on Monday night when a Republican lawmaker read sexually explicit material from books for young adults on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Children’s Committee ranking member Rep. Anne Dauphinais, R-Killingly, read excerpts from books she said can be found in Connecticut school libraries. The excerpts referenced oral sex and used vulgar terms for body parts and other sexual acts.

Monday night’s discussion was a continuation of a debate that began when the legislation, which attempts to prevent book banning, made its way through committee this session.

Dauphinais, a conservative Republican, has often raised concerns about pornography in libraries and cited specific books that have previously been considered for bans, many of them about sex education or coming-of-age stories that involve sexual situations and LGBTQ+ issues. 

Under the legislation, which passed the House early Tuesday morning as part of the biennial budget, 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.  

Dauphinais began her comments late Monday night by expressing frustration that House Democrats had inserted the bill’s language into the budget rather than allowing for debate solely on the issue. After describing some of the features of the legislation and her concerns, she warned anyone watching the debate — they are broadcast on CT-N — who might have children that there would be explicit language used, then listed some of the schools she said had the books in their libraries.

“Have you ever given logan a blow job,” she read from “l8r, g8r,” a coming-of-age story about friendship told in the form of instant messages between teenagers.

“Do you think that’s appropriate? I don’t,” she said.

“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 that point, Deputy Speaker Juan Candelaria, who was presiding over the House, banged the gavel and asked Dauphinais to stop “out of respect for others that might get offended.”

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

She switched to a type of self-censoring, referring to a “blow mob,” and a “sock.”

“This was the first time we ever had sex without protection. I see what the homies mean, it do feel different,” she read from “Concrete Rose,” a coming-of-age story about Black boyhood and manhood.

Then, Candelaria, D-New Haven, told her to stop reading from the document.

She continued, spelling curse words and reading an excerpt describing a vagina.

“This is disgusting,” she said. “And this is what our children are looking at in our schools.” She spoke for about half an hour.

Rep. Larry Butler, D-Waterbury, gave a speech afterward condemning the language.

“I will tell you that in my 18 years here, I have never seen the demonstration of such vulgarity tonight, reaching the lowest level that I’ve ever seen in this chamber,” Butler said. “When we’re talking about books in libraries, that’s one thing. You could just mention a book.”

“Certainly we don’t have to stoop to those levels to disagree,” Butler added.

Democratic leadership on Tuesday said the discussion was a waste of time, particularly for lawmakers who worked on more substantive policy issues related to the budget.

“For the socially moderate, fiscally conservative Republicans that still exist in Connecticut, to know that your entire budget debate comes down to somebody who wants to make this a cultural issue and use words like that, it would probably anger me,” said Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, D-Hartford. “It loses sight and track of many of the things they were mentioning. There were some people who made fiscal points on the budget.”

House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, complimented Candelaria’s professionalism at that moment.

“I think it just threw people off quite a bit to hear that kind of language being used on the floor,” Rojas said.

Asked about the debate, 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.”

He went on to defend Dauphinais, saying she raised important points.

“If an elected official has the courage to stand at a podium and say what she said and takes ownership of it, I have no problem,” Candelora said.

But Dauphinais said on Tuesday 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.” 

Dauphinais said she got the information about the book excerpts she read Monday night from Take Back the Classroom, a group that identifies books with explicit materials and has a database of which schools across the country have those books. They’re part of a larger movement around parental rights that mostly comes from the right side of the political aisle.

Those groups argue that parents should have more control over what their children learn in school.

Topic comes up again during Senate debate Tuesday

Late Tuesday, during the Senate’s debate on the same bill, Children’s Committee ranking member Sen. Henri Martin, R-Bristol, also raised objections to the library provision.

But instead of reading from a text, Martin provided his colleagues with a six-page handout of sexually explicit book excerpts and illustrations. The Senate took a moment of recess while staff handed out the pages on the floor.

Several of the excerpts were the same Dauphinais read on the House floor. Others included a description of a woman’s body and sex acts from “American Psycho,” along with illustrations of sexual positions and an illustrated tutorial on male masturbation.

“Out of respect, I chose not to read excerpts or show graphic examples from these books, which are very vulgar and obscene,” Martin said. “But to make it clear to my colleagues, I asked staff to distribute a handout. I want to remind everybody that these books have found their way into our schools.”

Appropriations Committee co-chair Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, said she thought the purpose was to avoid prescriptive bans on books.

“I think that what they’re doing here is giving an ability for someone to think it through,” she said.

Earlier discussions

This isn’t the first time sexually explicit content has been mentioned during this session’s debate about book bans.

Speakers at a Committee on Children public hearing in February also quoted from sexually explicit literature. Several focused on passages from the sex-ed graphic novel “Let’s Talk About It.”

Leslie Wolfgang, director of public policy at the Family Institute of Connecticut, said with the passage of the bill, “[Parents] won’t be able to stop their 11-year old from reading” the sexually explicit content. She also showed the committee photocopied images of masturbation from the book.

Another speaker read a passage about other sexual acts, with photos from the novel containing genitalia displayed on her Zoom background. 

Throughout the February committee meeting, speakers categorized sex-ed material as “radical” and likened it to “grooming.” 

Children’s Committee co-chair Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, read sexually explicit passages from Ezekiel and Song of Solomon in the Bible as a counterpoint. He asked if passages such as “She was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emissions were like that of the horse,” would disqualify the Bible from being placed in school libraries. 

Ritter said Tuesday there are different expectations for what can be read in a book versus what should be said on the floor of the House of Representatives. He pointed to Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” as an example. The American classic uses racial slurs throughout the work, but Ritter said those aren’t words he wants to hear during debate.

“You have a lot of books that have a lot of bad words in libraries, from very famous authors,” Ritter said. “To try to draw that correlation to the expectation of decorum on the House floor, I think, is very different.”

Reporters at CT Mirror used AI to analyze hours of public hearing testimony for this story. Reporters used an AI model to flag relevant quotes from the transcript of the Committee on Children public hearing. Reporters checked quotes against the video stream word-for-word, as well as the surrounding context.