Things are dire enough down Brattleboro way that someone named “Buck Russell” has launched a petition drive to prohibit panhandling. Gee, what do you know, you take a historic housing shortage, add a mass unhousing by state policymakers, toss in an opioid crisis we have yet to address, and hey presto, you get desperate people begging for money. Our unspoken pleas for the unhoused to simply, conveniently disappear seem to be falling on deaf ears.

The petition seeks to drive Brattleboro down a dead-end road. In 2018, the Vermont ACLU convinced six communities to deep-six their anti-panhandling ordinances. The nonprofit pointed to clear and consistent court rulings against such laws.

The 2015 Supreme Court case Reed v. Town of Gilbert made clear that it is unconstitutional for municipal ordinances to regulate only certain types of speech, including panhandling. Similarly, of the more than 25 laws attempting to ban panhandling reviewed by courts across the nation, all have been found unconstitutional.

I suppose that memories fade when communities are under stress. I doubt that the town Selectboard will give much credence to the petition, considering that Brattleboro was itself one of those communities that killed its anti-panhandling ordinance in 2018.

The petition itself is sort of a work of art in its own dystopian way. Russell does his level best to hide the wolf of contempt in the sheep’s clothing of compassion. He claims, in fact, that enacting a ban would actually be “encouraging [the unhoused] towards more sustainable solutions,” as if the unhoused could build housing and create a social safety net by themselves.

But if the petition tries to come across as Sincerely Having the Best Interests of Our Unfortunate Neighbors In Mind, the commenters employ no such restraints. Nay, rather, they are absolutely unhinged.

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