A Republican Maine state representative has filed a lawsuit alleging the state’s House speaker and other Democrats violated her First Amendment rights and disenfranchised her constituents by censuring her last month and barring from speaking or voting on the House floor.
State Rep. Laurel Libby has been an outspoken critic of Maine’s state policy allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports.
Libby recently posted on social media to draw attention to the Maine high school girls’ indoor track and field state championship, where a student who competed as a boy last year but now identifies as transgender took first place in girls’ pole vault. That first-place finish propelled the student’s team to win the championship by a single point.
Libby’s post included the student’s name and photographs. While Libby was criticized for naming the student, her lawsuit notes, “The Championship was a public event, was streamed online, and the names, schools and photographs of the winners were posted publicly.”
It is not clear to me that this is a First Amendment violation. Generally, legislative branches are given wide leeway by the courts to self-police their members. So I’m not sure that Rep. Libby’s lawsuit will succeed.
…“I had no idea my post would go viral like it did, but it did because it so inherently unfair to see a young man on a podium that a Maine girl deserved to be standing on,” Libby told CNN in an interview.
After Libby’s post, the Democratic-controlled Maine House voted along party lines 75-70 to censure Libby, declaring her post “reprehensible” and “incompatible with her duty and responsibilities as a member of the House.”
The censure required her to apologize, but she refused, so the House prohibited her from speaking or voting on the House floor for the rest of her term.
“It’s so obvious my censure is retaliation because they do not want to have a debate about the real issue, which is biological males participating in girls’ sports,” Libby said.
She’s correct. The only reason she’s being censured is that the Democrats don’t want to debate this issue.