Editor’s note: This letter is by Tom Licata, a resident of Burlington.
Persecutive and disturbing are two adjectives to describe the banning of the Burlington Ward 3 City Council Republican candidate from the old North End’s Facebook group.
Christopher-Aaron Felker has been denied access to some 1500 Ward 3 potential voters while the other two candidates have full access. Felker’s transgression, according to the Old North End’s Facebook moderator Holly Beckert, is that Felker is a known “transphobic” whose “hate speech” “doesn’t sit right with me.”
Felker’s campaign says his “view is shaped by his religious faith and in line with the Catholic Church.”
This kind of censorship in Vermont politics should not be tolerated.
Believing that men are born men and that women are born women are the beliefs of all the major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. Apart from religion, Natural Law, the moral basis of our nation, shares these views.
What’s going on is a kind of purge of reason, for ideology. It’s a kind of postmodern or social constructionist worldview.
The citizens of Burlington, its media and its political class should publicly condemn the banning of Candidate Christopher-Aaron Felker from the Old North End’s Facebook group.
Only those who hate the truth will call the truth hate.
When you’re speaking the truth, you welcome debate, for you know that truth is on your side. When you’re lying, you’ll do everything in your power to stifle debate so that you’re not exposed.
I submitted this commentary to my local Burlington Front Porch Forum yesterday afternoon and it was not published yesterday, nor today.
Thus my reporting on the censorship of Burlington Ward 3 City Council Republican Christopher-Aaron Felker by the Old North End Facebook group, has resulted in the censorship of my reporting on it by my local Burlington Front Porch Forum.
Irony personified.
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,…”
It’s amazing how open and unashamed the censoring in Vermont is.
You’ll be banned soon, ask me how I know!
And people, many of them think this is ok! That’s how heavy our indoctrination is in Vermont.
FPF is one of the most self-righteous organizations in the city.
I remember when they started. When it served them to get word of their existence our there they were much more lenient. Now they are a big part of the censorship problem.
With success, they have become arrogant as hell.
If the city provides them with any funds under the guise that they are providing a public service. It needs to be challenged and stopped.
Boycott FPF.