Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA) speaks on the Senate floor Photo: CSPAN/screenshot
While the MAGA crowd has clambered to ban books featuring Black or LGBTQ+ characters or themes with the support of Republicans, Democrats have steadfastly defended the First Amendment and pushed back against the Nazi-style efforts.
But when Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA) took to the Senate floor yesterday, her passionate opposition pulled no punches. To make the moment even sweeter, she read an excerpt from Black lesbian author Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, one of the most commonly challenged books.
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Butler has vowed to keep reading passages from banned books from the Senate floor. By reading these books into the Senate Record, Butler will ensure they are available for public viewing and consumption.
When she took the podium, Butler decried the “very harmful and anti-democratic practice” before citing the First Amendment’s prohibition of government censorship of what Americans can read or write.
“But a nationwide campaign in states like Florida, Utah, North Dakota, and even California has been deployed to limit our children’s learning and enforce restrictions on one of our most fundamental freedoms,” she pointed out.
“Right now, extremist politicians are working overtime to strip our nation’s bookshelves of essential literature that helps to tell the complete story of America, including the stories of great sacrifice, contribution, and pain of Black Americans.”
“These include stories of struggle and triumph against hatred and bigotry.”
Butler shamed the “lawmakers who seek to narrow the scope of what our children can learn about our history,” pointing out that the authors who have been challenged wrote about the topics minorities have long struggled to overcome.
“Now, the organizers of these state-by-state battles would you have you believe that they are upholding parents’ choice. That imposing these book bans would somehow protect the innocence of our children,” she continued before calling it a “slap in the face” to minority groups and authors “to have their very stories told.”
“Our nation’s most ethnically and racially diverse generation have seen themselves reflected in these pages and for these extremist adults to deem these stories inappropriate is a direct attack on their experience and their very existence.”
As “only the 12th Black senator to serve in this chamber and the first openly LGBTQ+ Black senator to serve, I will not stand by silently as our stories get erased,” she vowed.
Butler closed by reading an excerpt from Lorde’s classic collection of speeches and essays, deliberately choosing Lorde’s reflection on dealing with breast cancer.
“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it may be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences,” the excerpt included.
“Of what had I ever been afraid of? To question or to speak as I believed … could have meant pain or death, but we all hurt in so many different ways all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence.”
“While Miss Lorde first wrote and delivered this essay in 1977, I think we can all agree it could have been written just yesterday,” Butler concluded before calling on her colleagues to join her in reading and reflecting on banned books.
Chastised Republicans in the chamber sat in silence as Butler yielded the floor.
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