Halloran, 75, claimed in his apology that he was directing his remarks toward Sen. John Cavanaugh and another legislator, who had spoken out on the constitutional questions raised in the bill.
“I was not trivializing rape,” he said. “Should I have interjected the senators’ names? No. Sometimes we do things on the floor in the midst of making a statement we shouldn’t have done.”
Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh, 45, addressed the chamber in tears on Monday, describing the incident as harassment and “unbecoming of [Halloran] and unbecoming of this body.” She said she had “done nothing but try to have a respectful debate” about the bill, which seeks to prevent teachers and librarians from sharing “obscene” material even for educational purposes.
“That was so out of line and unnecessary and disgusting to say my name over and over again like that,” she continued, noting that there are women legislators who have experienced sexual violence.
Cavanaugh did respond to calls and emails requesting comment on Tuesday.
Last year, the two-term senator slowed the legislature’s work to a near standstill for several weeks when she engaged in a filibuster to protest a measure to restrict medical treatment for transgender youths. “I will burn the session to the ground over this bill,” she vowed.
She eventually backed off, and legislators passed a bill in May to ban gender-affirming care for minors.
The latest controversy comes as law enforcement and election officials have warned that violent political rhetoric could have real-world ramifications this election season. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said last weekend that there would be a “bloodbath” if he is not elected to a second term in November. Days earlier in Kansas, Republicans were castigated for holding a fundraiser where guests kicked and hit an effigy of President Biden.
Nebraska has a single-chamber legislature, with 32 registered Republicans and 17 registered Democrats serving in its Senate. This unicameral body governed for decades with relative bipartisanship, according to Kevin Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and it was not unusual to see members of opposition parties helming major committees.
But in recent years, as the national political discourse has become more vitriolic, the legislature has grown more divided as well, Smith said.
“What we’ve been seeing steadily over the past decade or more is the nationalization of state politics and the ideological polarization that accompanies it,” he noted Tuesday. “It’s pretty open conflict now, isn’t it?”
Smith said that lingering tensions over Machaela Cavanaugh’s strong stance against the law banning gender-affirming care may have had “some emotional spillover” in this week’s debate over the obscenity measure.
After Halloran’s widely condemned reading, state Sens. Megan Hunt (I) and Julie Slama (R) publicly called for his resignation on the social platform X. Hunt said it was “pure aggression to read a rape scene out loud and put it like that.”
Precious McKesson, head of the Nebraska Democratic Party, labeled the incident “unacceptable” on X and also urged Halloran to “resign now.”
Halloran’s office referred to his statement from the floor Tuesday when asked for a comment.
At the time of the incident, lawmakers were discussing Legislative Bill 441, which would remove an exception to the state’s obscenity law for teachers and librarians in non-postsecondary educational settings who are sharing material for educational purposes. The bill describes “obscene” as work that appeals to the “prurient interest” or describes sexual conduct in an offensive way and “lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” Opponents of the bill say it threatens teachers and librarians so they don’t put certain books on their shelves.
The bill comes amid a surge in attempted restrictions on reading materials in schools and libraries across the United States. In 2023, there was a 65 percent increase in titles targeted for censorship from 2022, the American Library Association reported last week.
“Lucky” was the 42nd most banned book in the United States during the 2021-22 school year, according to PEN America, the free expression group.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Joni Albrecht (R), apologized to Cavanaugh in the chamber. “I was mortified that you — whether your name was put in it, it was not right,” she said and went on to use the incident as an example of why such materials should not be allowed in schools. “I’m sorry that we even have to read anything like this,” she said.
The memoir, which tells author Alice Sebold’s story of being raped during her freshman year of college, has faced its own controversy and questions over the author’s version of events. Anthony Broadwater, who was convicted of Sebold’s sexual assault in 1981, was exonerated in 2021 after spending 16 years in prison and years on the sex offender registry, prompting the book’s publisher to stop distributing it.
In a commentary for WBUR last year, Boston University associate professor Joshua Pederson said the book offers “a vital perspective both on the trauma of rape and on the still-unfolding sexual assault crisis on our campuses.” He wrote that “Lucky” remains important despite the controversy, which reflects flaws in the judicial system and challenges the urge for “clear-cut ideas about trauma and victimization.”
Sen. John Cavanaugh said Halloran “missed the point” in the remarks he gave on the floor. “There are graphic scenes in books. There are graphic things that happen to people in life, and stories have context, and they give meaning to the people who read them, who feel alone,” Cavanaugh said.
“The whole point,” he added, “is that we cannot make a determination writ large about what has value and to whom it has value.”
