Critics say Progs’ actions inhibit free speech
by Aubrey Weaver, Community News Service
Out on her daily walk last year, Olivia Taylor noticed a sticker-covered street sign at the corner of Ethan Allen Parkway and North Avenue in Burlington’s New North End. In black typed text on each sticker were phrases that, to her, clearly targeted transgender people.
One said no one is ever “‘born into the wrong body.’” Another, in an apparent criticism of gender-affirming health care, called treatment “lifelong medical dependency” and “a business model.”
“I would just kind of scrape the stickers and keep walking,” said Taylor, a Burlington resident who ran for city council last year as a Progressive Party–endorsed independent and serves on her ward’s Neighborhood Planning Assembly steering committee. “But I started realizing that I was seeing more and more of them.”
Taylor met up with other members of the community to talk about what they had noticed.
“We all wanted to do something,” said Taylor. “I felt really frustrated the city wasn’t able to do anything.”
So she joined others in an informal campaign to take the stickers down. A small group of folks made a series of weekly trips around the New North End this past winter to remove the stickers — often found on signs or poles — and the effort is set to pick back up this summer. “I got to know people in my community who I’ve never met before and who also care,” Taylor said, adding, “The majority of our community really does care about removing them.”
The group launched a GoFundMe to buy thousands of stickers supporting trans people — and distribute them to be placed over the others — and raised more than $900 last summer.
Burlington city councilors unanimously adopted a resolution in March that, among other things, asked a council committee to look at changes to Burlington’s graffiti ordinance to deal with “graffiti that spreads hateful and harmful messages.” Residents can currently report graffiti of any kind through the city’s SeeClickFix site.
A heated public comment session preceded the vote March 13, though most who spoke supported the resolution, including Taylor, who said in an interview that she helped Councillor Joe McGee, P-Ward 3, write it.
At that public forum, Burlington GOP chair Christopher-Aaron Felker spoke in favor of the “stickering campaign.”
“We do not censor or criminalize speech in this nation because it offends,” said Felker.
Felker added: “Stickering campaigns are common forms of free and political speech. We didn’t invent stickering campaigns — we learned them from you all.”
He said movements like Black Lives Matter and the Vermont AFL-CIO also use stickers in their public messaging and that “if the city wishes to crack down on graffiti, they can crack down on everyone, but they won’t and we are not backing down.”
Community News Service reached out to Felker and Reduxx, a “biological feminist” news organization mentioned on some of the stickers, for comment, but neither responded.
Discussions on the issue have repeatedly raised questions about whether the stickers constitute protected speech. Vermont Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, P/D-Chittenden 6, one of the organizers of the sticker GoFundMe, wants to look into gaps that exist between hate crime laws and what actions slip through the cracks of the law like these stickers.
Mulvaney-Stanak said in an interview that she has an intern researching this topic and wants to see changes in how the state records and responds to so-called “bias acts” that haven’t reached hate crime classification.
Some of that begins with monitoring, said Mulvaney-Stanak. “It’s hard for the attorney general’s office, which has a civil rights unit, to have a really accurate understanding of clusters of hate crimes and bias acts in parts of the state because there’s no requirement under state law (to report bias acts and hate crimes).”
Mulvaney-Stanak hopes to “make sure that we are just leveling up on a state level to make sure there’s consistency across the state of law enforcement and just towns themselves. And then we’re just not letting these things go.”
Mulvaney-Stanak pointed out two other anti-LGBTQ+ acts in the state recently: reports that Vergennes Union High School plans to host a vocally transphobic public speaker for a school event and an instance where a queer poet was accosted by protesters at a reading in Lyndonville’s public library.
Mulvaney-Stanak said some Vermonters “are really falling in line with all the (anti-LGBTQ+) rhetoric out there nationwide — those folks exist here and those are some of the folks putting the stickers up locally.”
Speaking about Republican politicians, Mulvaney-Stanak said, “It’s this hostile environment where they’re really creating all this fear and misinformation around parental rights and coming in at that angle, at least for young people … No one’s taking parental rights away. What we’re trying to do is save lives for kids who are in hostile home environments where, you know, their parents are just not accepting of who they are.”
Taylor, too, expressed concerns about the stickers adversely affecting young people. “I think the biggest thing is that they are showing up in front of playgrounds and schools,” she said. “Especially when children all over our country are being punished for wanting gender-affirming care … It’s really concerning that this seems to be specifically targeting children.”
Taylor said she hasn’t been able to keep up with the weekly cleanups due to family complications but is committing to monthly cleanup walks, the next being July 2.
“It’s really easy when I’m walking alone to get really angry and frustrated with the amount of stickers,” said Taylor, “but one of the things that makes me really hopeful is that the stickers are never up for very long without being scratched or crossed out by someone in the community.”
Categories: Burlington
So much for spreading positive body image! That’s the problem with the rhetoric and doublethink involved in Woke ideology: it routinely goes against itself. If an ideology has no foundation, especially because it cuts the legs out from underneath itself, it is invalid and will be eventually discarded.
Example: “Born that way” and “positive body image” cancel out “my body, my choice” and “born in the wrong body.” What we need to do as Conservatives, or other sane individuals, is to help deprogram, not attack, those who are deceived by this imitation-philosophy.
These people make me sick, Not the ones telling the truth about it being a business model, lifelong dependency on health care and that God never puts anyone into the wrong body, but the people who rely on the state to remove things that they don’t like. The ones who turn the truth inside out for their own sick twisted self.
And just for the record, I’m not a republican, I’m a normal thinking adult who understands history a bit and knows how communism creeps in through societal changes like convincing everyone that it’s normal and healthy to not accept your own body, and perpetuate that into the minds of children. So that generationally these changes can’t be undone, you know by using things like drag story time.
We don’t need another Prog-Lib running in our Vermont govt.. There are too many as it is. I confess, I did not read the whole article, the first few sentences and I was already saying to myself “blah, blah, blah”. Enough already with the trans crap being shoved down out throats. In 2020 we had people writing “black lives matter” in streets. Sorry, but the whole George Floyd fiasco, was just that. It was a fiasco of lies racial division, BLM & Antifa looting, rioting, burning down whatever they could or simply destroying property. Then it was vaxxed vs. unvaxxed. Now it’s transgenders, drag queens overload. Just stop. Enough is enough.
“Taylor, too, expressed concerns about the stickers adversely affecting young people. “I think the biggest thing is that they are showing up in front of playgrounds and schools,” she said. “Especially when children all over our country are being punished for wanting gender-affirming care … It’s really concerning that this seems to be specifically targeting children.””
Yeah, Taylor, it’s the STICKERS targeting the children. Stickers? Really????
And yet if someone scaped off the pro trans, etc. stickers that might offend people who are sick of it being shoved down our throats repeatedly, they’d most certainly be accused of a hate crime. Can you say, “double standard??”
The stickers convey a statement of fact. The stickers are not “anti trans” and I’m not happy that this publication states they are. Come on, do better Guy
Jason, the article is not by Mr. Page. The byline states: “by Aubrey Weaver, Community News Service”.
LOOK, YOU DEGENERATE MARXISTS: YOU DON”T SEEM TO AS YET UNDERSTAND, SO I’M SHOUTING IT OUT TO YOU AS YOU’RE VERY OBVIOUSLY HARD OF HEARING AS WELL AS DUMB AS PROVERBIAL ROCKS:
I, AS WELL AS ANY AMERICAN OR VERMONTER, SHALL SAY WHATEVER I WANT, WHENEVER I WANT, WHEREVER I WANT so long as I am not threatening anyone. AS FAR AS BIAS? I, AS WELL AS ANY AMERICAN OR VERMONTER, SHALL HOLD AS MUCH “BIAS” OR AS LITTLE “BIAS” AS I WISH BECAUSE YOU AND YOUR MARXIST COHORTS DO NOT HAVE ANY RIGHT TO DECIDE WHAT I SHOULD THINK OR NOT THINK, WHEN I SHOULD OR SHOULDN’T THINK IT, OR WHERE I SHOULD OR SHOULDN’T THINK IT —- BECAUSE THOSE ARE CALLED: MY RIGHTFUL OPINIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The above is my God-given Constitutional rights under both Federal law as well as state and your INSIPID bills cannot override these Constitutional rights EVER!!!!!!!!!!! And your attempts at legislating whatever opinion YOU don’t agree with as “hate” speech is MUTE — As there is NO SUCH THING AS “hate speech” to begin with, only free speech.
Further, you and your radicalized, anti-science “teachers” hold NO rights whatsoever to interfere or violate or infringe upon the legal PARENTAL rights parents & legal guardians have over their offspring and it is NONE OF YOUR GODFORSAKEN BUSINESS to decide whether or not such legal guardians are “accepting of who they are”. It is the PARENTAL right to impart morals, religion, ethics, tenets, and values to children – NOT yours!
I’ve had it and I’m DONE. You know my name & you know where I live. Come and show me how you believe you are going to keep ME from exhibiting “bias” against practices that my RELIGION knows are intrinsically amoral & and that mainstream science knows are wrong.
I’ll be home all night tonight….you sniveling, maniacal, cowardly Communists. How’s THAT for some independent free speech?
I believe that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as it harms no one else.
But don’t expect me to condone all types of behavior. Live and let live but don’t expect me to like it or promote it.
Ahhh……but that’s your mistake. You ARE expected & in fact demanded to like it AND promote it.
… and the consequences are being labeled a hater and a murderer. Even remaining silent on the issue of the rainbow agenda is verboten…”silence equals violence”…
If the stickers are predominantly appearing on public property such as the backs of street signs, isn’t is more an issue of vandalism rather than free speech? Why not just pass an ordinance making all public property besides a bulletin board off limits to posting messaging? I guess that would be hard to objectively enforce now that every vertical surface, public or private in Burlington is considered a medium for “street art”.
In Montpelier, the climate activists plastered stickers all over the bike path bridge and utility poles in the city. Ironically, those stickers couldn’t be made, shipped, or stuck onto a surface without fossil fuels. Only the left activists have the right to wave their flags, paint the roads and sidewalks, slap stickers wherever they deem their right to do so, and deface public property at will to get their message across. The reason the Left politicians and bureaucrat activists are so angry is the majority has had enough of their hypocricy, deceptions, and juvenile, arrested development, behaviors. I feel sorry for them because they are nothing more than pawns for wealthy puppet Masters who laugh at them and hate them – yet love the fact they can use them for their dirty work. Fools and their follies know no better.
Completely agree and yet I bet there are those even on here – a platform for conservatism and common sense – who think my above slightly lengthy remarks are “angry” and “indignant” & “unkind”. Darn STRAIGHT they are! And they are also entirely accurate and words that are entirely NEEDED!
Is it “unkind” to be ejecting artificial hormones into children’s bodies without parental permission?? Is it “unkind” to defile & deface people’s houses of worship?? Is it “unkind” to MERCILESSLY slaughter unborn babies in the womb & refer to it as “health care”?? Is it “unkind” to beat the heck out of average Americans (summer 2020 & thereafter) because they oppose your radicalized ideologies??
Do we NOT have a right, if not a moral obligation, to become angry & naturally feel indignant by the manner in which they have and are inflicting mental and spiritual and physical pain on average Americans in order to attempt to force submission to this lunacy??
Vermonters…cease the laid-back, “I cannot “offend” anyone even if they are murdering someone” routine and GET “angry” & speak up!!!! Your entire nation and all it represents is at stake here!
They are Communists and cowards and all I called them earlier, and yeah……..I’m “ANGRY”!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear know the depths of evil and spiritual warfare playing out. Those who twist righteous indignation as a threat to their conjured bubble of reality are lost in the wilderness. We are far past the time to pick a lane. As gut-wrenching as it is to watch people led into the pits of Hell, the consequence is their’s and their’s alone. Those with a conscience and stand their ground will survive and prevail. The universe does not favor or reward the wicked – 2000 years of history prove that to be so.