A Muzzle Award for a New Hampshire legislator who wants to make it easier to ban school books

New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2005 by Ken Lund.

New Hampshire state Rep. Glenn Cordelli says he hasn’t read “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” 1999 young-adult novel by Stephen Chbosky that deals with issues such as sexual assault and mental health. But that hasn’t stopped him from having an opinion about it.

“If people think that this crap is culture, then we’re in bad trouble in New Hampshire,” the Republican legislator said at a recent hearing, according to a report by Anthony Brooks of WBUR Radio. “These explicit sexual materials have no place in our schools.”

When pressed by Democratic Sen. Debra Altschiller as to whether Cordelli had actually read the entire book, Cordelli replied that he had not — and that he had “no interest” in completing her homework assignment.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped Cordelli from filing a bill that would ease the way for parents to challenge books they don’t want their children to have access to. If the bill becomes law, such books could be “restricted or removed from public school classrooms and libraries,” Brooks writes. “The bill would allow parents to their take complaints to the state Department of Education, and expands state obscenity laws.”

For this assault on the right of kids to be educated, Cordelli has richly earned a New England Muzzle Award.

Cordelli’s proposal, House Bill 324, would ban depictions of “nudity,” “sadomasochistic abuse,” “sexual conduct” and “sexual excitement,” all of which are described in such excruciatingly explicit detail that one suspects the legislation itself might be banned from the classroom should it ever be enacted.

Brooks’ report also quotes Katie DeAngelis, a New Hampshire woman who said that reading Chbosky’s book helped her deal with her own experience of sexual assault. “What it did do is make me feel a lot less alone,” she told WBUR.

By the way, Cordelli appears to be quite a piece of work. According to Ethan DeWitt of the New Hampshire Bulletin, he has also filed a bill that would subject anyone who helps an unemancipated pregnant minor get an abortion to criminal and civil penalties.

The book ban that Cordelli and his fellow Republican legislators are pushing for comes in the midst of a repressive political climate in the Granite State. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and though Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has at least some moderate credentials, it’s unclear whether she would sign the bill or not.

In New Hampshire, criminalizing political speech

Kelly Ayotte

New Hampshire Republicans have hit upon a novel idea to help U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte: lock up a pollster hired by one of her opponents for the crime of engaging in political speech.

According to the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state GOP, chaired by Gov. John Sununu, has asked Attorney General Michael Delaney to investigate an allegation of push-polling by a pollster hired on behalf of Democratic congressional candidate Paul Hodes.

Push-polling is the practice of asking leading, negative questions of a rival candidate’s likely supporters. According to the Union Leader, respondents who identified themselves as leaning toward Ayotte were asked about her alleged inaction regarding a mortgage scandal that unfolded when she was New Hampshire’s attorney general and her deletion of e-mails when she stepped down from that office.

The Union Leader found that the calls were made on Hodes’ behalf by Mountain West Research, an Idaho-based polling firm hired, in turn, by Anzalone Liszt Research, a national outfit whose clients include Hodes. The Hodes campaign hasn’t exactly denied the allegation.

Now, as it happens, negative push-polling is illegal in New Hampshire unless the pollster identifies the candidate on whose behalf the call is being made and provides some other information as well. That means someone — an executive of one of the polling firms, or perhaps even Hodes himself — could be found to have broken the law.

It’s not clear what the maximum punishment could be. The Union Leader reports that the top penalty is a $1,000 civil fine. But an Associated Press story that appears in today’s Boston Globe reports that Associate Attorney General Richard Head says a violation could also carry with it a one-year prison term.

The law itself is an affront to freedom of speech, and so is the Republican Party’s attempt to use it to silence the opposition. Push-polling is a sleazy, underhanded campaign tactic — which means that it’s exactly the sort of political speech the First Amendment was designed to protect.

We await Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr’s take on all this.

Photo (cc) by Travis Warren and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.