Letter to the Editor: Banning is on the Ballot

To the Editor:

In June, a number of candidates on the current Old Lyme and Lyme RTC slates, including Board of Ed candidates Mary Powell St. Louis and Mike Presti, signed a letter seeking removal of sex ed books from the Young Adult section of the public library.  Surrogates continue this shameless campaign even now, and have gone so far as to publicly call for the resignation of Democrats on the Board of Education who have rejected this censorship. 

So what’s all the fuss about?  Two cartoon sex education books.  Are the books obscene? Unequivocally: no.  From a legal perspective it isn’t even close. The U.S. Supreme Court addressed this issue in Miller v. California. There, the Court noted that in order for a book to be determined obscene, one must review it “taken as a whole” and find that its primary purpose was to appeal to “prurient interests” (i.e. to turn people on). The Court understood that context matters. It understood that historically censorship proponents often cherry-picked “objectionable” out-of-context snippets to the detriment of society.  For example, the previously governing Comstock Laws led to anatomy textbooks being prohibited from being sent to medical students on obscenity grounds. (At least those future doctors didn’t have to see naked people!)

A reasonable person would see that taken as a whole, these books are meant as a form of relatable and informal sex education – a sometimes goofy but genuinely sincere attempt to answer the very real questions that might stem from an often confusing and clinical school curriculum.

Unless they are your own kids, attempting to “hide” that resource from teens who seek it out isn’t just wrong, it’s unconstitutional.  The federal court in a case called Sund v. Wichita Falls, found that “the First Amendment to the United States Constitution indisputably protect(s) the right to receive information” and therefore the First Amendment is violated by “the forced removal of children’s books to the adult section of the Library.” Almost a duplicate of the facts here. (But the Court does give a solution, “if a parent wishes to prevent her child from reading a particular book, that parent can and should accompany the child to the Library, and should not prevent all children in the community from gaining access to constitutionally protected materials.”) That should end this. These books are by definition not obscene, and banning them, moving them, or restricting them is unconstitutional censorship. That’s the law.  

So why are we still having this conversation?  Because certain people have made a choice.  They’ve gone “all in.”  They’ve decided that the national Republican Party has cracked the code to victory.  

And that code means book bans are on the ballot. 

Sincerely,

David Rubino,
Old Lyme.