State Sen. Jon Bramnick’s vote in support of a bill to safeguard librarians who feel harassed by people who seek to remove certain books has drawn the ire of Sussex County Republicans for supporting an initiative pushed by “far-left extremists.”
“Bramnick just did a huge f – – k you to Sussex County,” said Joseph Labarbera, the Sussex GOP chairman.
“Not only does this jeopardize the safety and mental health of our children and threaten to adversely socialize them into dark avenues for predation, but it also destabilizes the growing unity of the New Jersey Republican Party during this crucial election period,” said Labarbera. “We see his actions as a betrayal.”
But Bramnick said he’s willing to take on fights, but isn’t engaging with Labarbera.
“I don’t want to be a sound bite warrior,” he said.
Bramnick was the lone Republican to vote for the “Freedom to Read Act” that prohibits a local school board or municipal governing body from excluding material from a school library merely because of its views and protects library staffers from civil and criminal lawsuits.
The vote puts the moderate, anti-Trump lawmaker at odds with the more conservative Sussex Republicans, but any path Bramnick has to win the Republican nomination for governor next year does not cross through Sussex County.
Bramnick maintains that his fellow Republicans couldn’t point to any objectionable actions in the bill beyond its name.
“Without this bill, there are no standards or guidelines for what material is made available to our students in school libraries. Right now it is the wild, wild west, and this bill will require local school boards to set developmentally appropriate standards as to what content is made available to students,” Bramnick said. “Librarians will now have clear guidelines and policies to follow while protecting them from civil and criminal penalties, unless they break with the locally established regulations in bad faith.”
The two-term state senator said the bill “preserves a parent’s right to request the removal of material from libraries and requires the local school boards to create a procedure to process those requests.”
“This is not the same bill that was introduced months ago,” stated Bramnick. “Questionable provisions were removed through the legislative process in response to concerns from conservative advocacy groups including the Family Policy Center which was opposed to the bill in its original form but ultimately changed their position to neutral.”