Laurel Libby, a Republican state legislator in Maine, has been censured by Democrats in the Maine House of Representatives for a February 17 social media post in which she expressed disapproval of allowing “trans” girls (boys) to compete in high school sports for girls.
The alleged reason for the censure? Her post mentioned the winner of a girls’ track championship who is publicly known to be the winner and publicly known to be male.
Censuring Libby for stating her views would be bad enough. But the legislature went beyond putting its disapproval (or the Democratic majority’s disapproval) on record.
Representative Libby isn’t being allowed to speak as a representative during session. And she’s not being allowed to vote until she apologizes.
For stating her views on a public question.
Nor was she even allowed to defend herself when the House voted along party lines 75 – 70 to censure her.
This qualifies as tyranny, another mile down the slippery slope of eroding — or dynamiting — democratic norms and practices. The tyranny is not that of an autocrat but of the majority. In this case, the tyranny of a majority of partisans in a legislature.
It is also an attack on free speech. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression observes, people elect representatives to “vote according to their conscience and express themselves freely on controversial topics.”
Rightly, Laurel Libby has refused to remove the Facebook post criticizing the policy of the Maine Principals’ Association. Wrongly, her constituents continue to be deprived of her voice and vote in the legislature.
She is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to redress this injustice. Let it act, and fast.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Antidemocracy in Maine”
They’re dems. Would you expect anything less?
I hope that many people will come to understand that having competitions restricted to females is not about fairness and certainly not about equality.
Whether we are discussing men’s sports or women’s sports, interest in sports is founded upon reproductive drives. Most things regarded as if men’s sports competitions are really open competitions, but women fair poorly in them. Therefore, so that we can none-the-less observe the best performances by females, some competitions are reserved for that sex. Allowing biologic males to participate utterly subverts the underlying purpose of the original restriction. If competitions cannot be reserved for females, every competitor ought after all just to participate in the open competitions.
I don’t know that Laurel Libby grasps all this, but she has hold of a piece of truth. And we see, once again, that the “progressive” fantasy is not really one of censoring falsehood but of censoring propositions that “progressives” want to push aside.