A mostly male board will decide whether a Nebraska lawmaker faces censure for sexual harassment

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A Nebraska lawmaker implored the Legislature’s Executive Board on Thursday to hold a colleague accountable for invoking her name in a graphic reading on the legislative floor, which some say constitutes sexual harassment.

The decision of whether Republican state Sen. Steve Halloran will face a censure vote of the full Legislature now rests with a group of their colleagues who are mostly men.

“If we don’t move this forward, we are in fact condoning this kind of speech,” Democratic state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh said at a hearing on her resolution. “This has traumatized the public. It has traumatized my family.”

The Executive Board consists of eight men and one woman. All but one are Republican in the officially nonpartisan Nebraska Legislature.

The hearing was held 10 days after Halloran took to the mic on the floor and repeatedly called out the name “Sen. Cavanaugh” while reading a graphic account of rape from a best-selling memoir, making it appear as if that lawmaker was the subject of the assault. His embellished reading from the memoir “Lucky” by Alice Sebold came during debate of a bill that would have held school librarians and teachers criminally responsible for providing what it considers to be “obscene material” to students in grades K-12.

Most people in the chamber at the time — including Cavanaugh — understood the graphic comments to be directed at her, and she was visibly shaken immediately after Halloran’s remarks. Halloran insisted later that he was invoking the name of her brother and fellow Democratic Nebraska lawmaker, state Sen. John Cavanaugh, as a way to get him to pay attention to the remarks.

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