By Guy Page
I walked in (15 minutes late) into the 10 AM, Thursday March 20 meeting of the Vermont House Health Care Committee, where transgendered teens were explaining their life experience to the committee and asking for its support.
The experience was quiet and civil. Questions asked, questions answered. No one complained or interrupted. You can see the whole meeting (or virtually all of it) on the Legislature’s website and on goldendomevt.com.
As I took out my camera, Chair Allyssa Black paused the live feed and noted that everyone in the room had agreed that because children were testifying, there would be no photos or video taken except what was approved by the children. I complied, shot a few seconds of the committee members, and then left the room.
My judgement was that although any recognized speaker at a publicly warned government meeting essentially surrenders the right to keep those remarks confidential, I also recognized that youth are involved, an agreement had apparently been made, and it wasn’t worth disrupting the business of the Legislature to prove a legal point.
In the hallway outside, I had a very pleasant, quiet conversation with one of the fathers of the children. Interestingly, he said none of the children requested the photo policy declared by Chair Black. But I wasn’t there, so I will give Black the benefit of the doubt. For five minutes or so we enjoyed a calm, you-speak-I-listen conversation, the kind that needs to happen on complex, emotional issues.
Then Rep. Mari Cordes (D-Lincoln) emerged from the committee room and things got tense and loud fast. She made critical, confrontational remarks about VDC coverage, stated that last Wednesday’s disruption of the DeTransitioning Awareness Day (which she promoted on social media) was an exercise of free speech rights, and then dropped a bomb: she called me a child rapist. You are contributing to the rape of children!, Cordes loudly declared in the State House hallway. She repeated the ‘child rapist’ charge several times in slightly different words. When I asked her to explain, she didn’t, and just walked off, but not before repeating at least twice, “You’re despicable.’
And yeah, by that time, I was pretty heated, too. I asked her if she defended the suppression of free speech last Wednesday. (She did, as noted above.) Rep. Topper McFaun (R-Barre) took me by the arm and gently encouraged me to settle down. Which I did.
The sad thing is I’ve always had a lot of respect for Cordes. Anyone who has spent a lifetime as a nurse gets instant props from me. She’s also a gifted singer and has shared that gift in State House devotionals. And she’s just smart and unafraid to stand up for her principles. That’s all very admirable.
So it baffles me to be called out as a child rapist. Accused of an awful crime because, I can only suppose, VDC supports the free expression of detransitioning experience in the Vermont State House.
Transgender ideology is apparently a sacred cow among the majority of the members of the Vermont Legislature. It goes where it wants and does what it wants. It can tread all over someone else’s First Amendment Rights.
Well, I think sacred cows make good hamburger. No ideology – not Mari Cordes’, not mine, not Donald Trump’s, not Bernie Sanders’ – is so sacred that it may be allowed to suppress anyone’s right to speak and be heard.
Why don’t they get that?
Maybe someday Mari Cordes and I will sit down and listen to each other. I look forward to it. But in the meantime – if there IS a sacred cow wandering around the Golden Dome to which I defer, her name is Lady Liberty, and the Bill of Rights is her shrine.