Tag Archives: Jubilee McGill

So Brenda Siegel Was… Right? All Along

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When I’ve had conversations with someone in Vermont officialdom and the name “Brenda Siegel” comes up, it usually elicits a bit of a grimace. Siegel isn’t a comfortable character. She’s direct, some would say abrasive. She’s a fierce advocate for an unpopular cause. When she walks into a legislative hearing, the assembled lawmakers brace for impact. When she earned the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2022, the party offered some support but endorsements were few and the donor class shunned her campaign.

And now that H.938 has become law as Act 143, she ought to be taking a nice long victory lap. She did issue a press release; otherwise I suspect she got right back to work.

Act 143 is far from perfect, but it’s a much better law than any of our political leaders really wanted. It’s an attempt at creating a comprehensive response to homelessness instead of the box of Band-Aids that is the hotel/motel program. Crucially, it requires for the first time that the state’s homelessness response system must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I bet you thought that was a given, but apparently not.

There are other heroes in this story — House Human Services Chair Theresa Wood and Rep. Jubilee McGill for starters — but it wouldn’t have happened without Siegel’s tenacity and willingness to be unpopular in the service of her cause.

And in the category of poetic justice, End Homelessness Vermont, the nonprofit she founded and ran on a shoestring, is now part of the official system. The state’s FY2027 budget includes a $200,000 appropriation for EHV, which will now work alongside state agencies to try to lift the unhoused into safe, productive lives.

Gee, maybe she could have been a good governor after all.

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Let’s Take a Moment to Marvel at the Dispassionate Reasoning of Vermont Conservatives

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Thankfully, the tide appears to be ebbing on the Great Statehouse Trans PANIC! of 2025. It’s been days since the Vermont Daily Chronicle could gin up any fresh angles on the ridiculous story. Which, as a reminder, featured a group of Christian conservatives whining — inaccurately — that their free speech rights had been trampled by a handful of trans folk dancing around a Statehouse meeting room. As we previously noted, there is no First Amendment right to deliver speech in a given location or on a given medium.

But before we consign this fiasco to the dustbin of history, we should take note of two particularly ridiculous attempts to exploit this mildest of contretemps. First, a tiny extremist “parental rights” group unwittingly exposing the absurdity of its own claims. And second, the head of the Vermont Republican Party claiming that state lawmakers have a solemn duty to maintain a perfect attendance record.

This will involve a bit of exposure to the rantings of SPEAKVT, a group of far-right rabble-rousers in the Essex-Westford school district. The group’s president Marie Tiemann put out a statement about the March 12 “detransitioning” event sponsored by SPEAKVT and the Vermont Family Alliance. Funny thing, her statement is kind of a self-own.

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PANIC! At the Statehouse

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You know the funny thing about all those conservatives who carry pocket Constitutions everywhere they go, many of whom revere our founding document as divinely inspired?

The funny thing is, they have no idea what the First Amendment says or means. Are those pocket Constitutions ever actually read, or are they just fetish objects?

Latest example: The ongoing kerfuffle over a March 12 incident at the Statehouse, in which an event sponsored by the far-right Vermont Family Alliance was interrupted by a handful of dancing transgender folk. (To judge by available footage, it was the mildest, most unthreatening “disruption” I have ever seen in my life.) Eventually the meeting was shut down by the Sergeant at Arms. Conservatives instantly went into full tizzy mode over the trans folk’s alleged interference with VFA’s First Amendment rights.

I haven’t addressed this before because I thought it would go away (as it should), but the right-wing echo machine has cranked itself up to eleven. So I guess I have to explain this. Slowly.

The First Amendment guarantees your right of free speech. It does not guarantee your right to a particular platform. There is no Constitutional right to hold an event in Room 11 of the Statehouse, just as there is no Constitutional right to express your views in the pages of the New York Times or on a given social media platform or on a specific streetcorner or in a crowded theater.

The VFA folks could have gone out in the hall or out on the front lawn. Or anywhere. They didn’t have to be deterred by a few counter-protesters dancing around. Which, from available video evidence, is absolutely all they did.

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