On Town Meeting Day, the Rutland City School Board shifted left again, meaning the high school’s mascot debate is likely to continue. Also, Burlington residents voted in favor or legalizing prostitution and keeping Progressives in control of City Council.
Burlington’s Question 5 proposal to bar city council from regulating sex workers passed with 63% of the vote.
According to Vermont Right to Life’s Maggie Kerrin, the result will be a disservice to those in sex work.
IN BURLINGTON?: Burlington’s residents just voted to ban any laws concerning prostitution.
“Burlington residents need a lot more education about what it actually was that they just passed,” she said. “They clearly don’t seem to fully understand what this will mean for their community and for the vulnerable people in their community.”
Kerrin noted that bill H.630, currently advancing in the Statehouse, is very similar to Burlington’s charter change, but with statewide impact.
“It would basically do the same thing statewide,” she said.
Kerrin added that while proponents of legalized prostitution say sex trafficking will remain illegal, legalized prostitution and sex trafficking go hand-in-hand.
“If you didn’t have prostitution then you wouldn’t have trafficking. You are talking about creating a market that needs to be fed,” she said.
The proposed charter change will now go to the Vermont Legislature for consideration.
More school mascot drama for Rutland?
Earlier in the year, the Rutland City School Board of Commissioners voted to return its mascot name to “the Raiders” after a previously liberal-leaning board removed the name during a lengthy mascot controversy. The name was restored to the Raiders when three conservative candidates were voted onto the board in 2021.
But on Tuesday, liberal candidates gained three seats back, and so the mascot controversy may continue.
While four conservative candidates ran for the board, only one of them, Karen Bossi, was successful. Bossi and her husband, Anthony Bossi, are not strangers to public life. Bossi was a paralegal supervisor for the state, and her husband was a police chief for the city. She recently told the Mountain Times that constituents are “tired of [the mascot debates].”
Bob Pearo, a conservative candidate who lost his race on Tuesday, told True North that he is worried about the election’s impact on the schools.
“We ran a campaign that was just based off of citywide residents, and just getting our name out there,” he said. “… I’m really disheartened for our children and the school system because I just don’t even want to think about which direction this is going to go in now.”
Pearo said there is speculation that the new left-leaning board will take up the mascot issue yet again.
“I can guarantee you that’s what’s going to happen,” he said.
Pearo said conservative candidates did not run on the mascot issue, but rather on transparency for the administration, enforcing anti-bullying policies, and getting parents more involved in general.
“We ran on bringing education back to our kids and not indoctrinating them — things of that nature, and I guess we just got outvoted,” he said. I’m not really sure how that worked out. It just seems very odd to vote to keep parents out of the school system; it just seems very weird to me.”
One newly elected board member, Marybeth Lennox-Levins, was endorsed by a gay and lesbian organization in Washington, D.C., OutVoices.us. Another newly elected board member, Sara Doenges, said while she’s for the “Ravens” name, the issue “needs to go to rest now.”
Candidate Courtney Collins, who is engaged to Aldermen member Matt Whitcomb, also gained a seat on the school board. Regarding the mascot issue, Collins wrote “you can’t change hearts and minds with a bulldozer.”
Burlington City Council stays Progressive
Up north in the Queen City, voters made sure Burlington City Council will remain a Progressive stronghold for the immediate future.
Progressive Party candidates defeated challengers for three seats, and won a fourth in an uncontested race. The result is a City Council with six total Progressives — a defeat for Mayor Miro Weinberger, who needed center or right-leaning candidates to help him appoint Acting Police Chief Jon Murad to a permanent position.
Progressives maintain control of Burlington City Council https://t.co/AecD2o2rpQ via @vtdigger #vt #vtpoli
— VT Progressive Party (@progparty) March 2, 2022
Michael Bielawski is a reporter for True North. Send him news tips at bielawski82@yahoo.com and follow him on Twitter @TrueNorthMikeB.
Consider this view from our neighbors in next door NH.
Burlington Vermont Voters ‘Legalize’ Prostitution
BY STEVE MACDONALD / 3 MARCH 2022
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2022/03/burlington-vermont-voters-legalize-prostitution
“A 1972 Playboy article famously advocated for far-left radicals to create a new socialist society in Vermont, based on the ideas of two ‘firebrand’ law students: “What we advocate is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political take-over of that state through the elective process.””
So, in my opinion, welcome to this B. F. Skinner version of ‘Walden II’, which of course, has morphed into William Golding’s infamous account of the ‘Lord of the Flies’, now a metaphor for Vermont’s dystopian island of progressive liberalism – i.e., a permanent adolescent state.
“Ralph hides in the jungle and thinks miserably about the chaos that has overrun the island. He thinks about the deaths of Simon and Piggy and realizes that all vestiges of civilization have been stripped from the island. He stumbles across the sow’s head, the Lord of the Flies, now merely a gleaming white skull—as white as the conch shell, he notes. Angry and disgusted. Ralph knocks the skull to the ground and takes the stake it was impaled on to use as a weapon against Jack.”
Hopefully, the grown-ups will arrive in time to save us from ourselves.
“The officer matter-of-factly assumes the boys are up to, as he puts it, “fun and games.” When he learns what has happened on the island, the officer is reproachful: how could this group of boys, he asks—and English boys at that—have lost all reverence for the rules of civilization in so short a time?”
How indeed. I’m afraid that no matter what we do now, no matter how hard we try, we can’t make a silk purse from this sow’s ear without more grown-ups. God help us.
Corruption becomes a cult when ignorance is encouraged.
We can thank the legacy Vermont media for leading Vermonters down this smelly path to the outhouse.
These urban city values brought by do gooders to Vermont hicks need to go back where they came from and take their ‘little bits of evil’ back with them.
Shame on ANY Vermonter who votes for the bondage and commodification of women’s bodies.
Go find a knothole, sonny Leftie boy.
Raise your daughter to be a prossie, Leftie Mom.
Burlington swirling a bit faster down the toilet to the sewer. I think it’s time to change the
nickname ‘Queen City” to Sin City….
Maggie Kerrin and Michael Shively participated in an interview on Generally Irritable several weeks ago. It very well explains the in and outs of what has been voted in. The Burlington voters didn’t vote this in. It’s the “representatives” apparently just beyond their diaper changing years that the people voted in. Time for a change for Burlington voters.
Yes, we have a gaggle of fools on the City Council in Burlington, and this proves it,
hey homeowners the joke’s on you, homeless on one corner, hookers on the other !!