Andreatta: Bluster and 'snowflakes' in Webster

David Andreatta | Democrat and Chronicle

Show Caption Hide Caption Webster political signs: Free speech, crossing the line ... or both? David Andreatta reached out to a Webster homeowner whose signs are considered offensive and misogynistic to some of his neighbors. (June 2017)

John Gisel doesn’t sugarcoat his feelings about the man working to make America great again — and you can’t do anything about it.

In the driveway of his old farmhouse on Gravel Road in Webster are signs that read, “Trump 2016: No More Bulls---!” and “Vote Trump: Finally Someone With Balls,” and another depicting a dog urinating on Hillary Clinton.

He removed dozens of other signs that ringed his property during election season, along with a “Trump 2016: F--- Your Feelings” flag, but he kept the three in the driveway to stick it to the “snowflakes” he said kept stealing his signs last fall.

“The snowflakes were so mad,” Gisel said. “That’s why I left them up there.”

A handful of people have complained to the town, arguing that the signs and their profanity are in full view of the street for all to see, including schoolchildren on passing buses.

Once, a librarian at the local branch called Town Hall to calm a distraught woman at the checkout who was beside herself over the signs.

“There should be a line that communities don’t cross,” said Max Lent, who lives nearby. “I don’t think it’s a demonstration of a healthy community when people put out signs like that.”

To concerns like these, Gisel, 48, who has grown children, said he wants youngsters to know how crooked Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration were. Kids will be reading about it in history books soon enough, he said, but until then he wants to do his part to educate America’s youth.

“If it offends somebody, that’s too bad,” he said. “Maybe they should move to a different country.”

The town has chosen not to tangle with Gisel, deferring to the First Amendment.

“The town supervisor and I look at it as a freedom of speech issue and there’s not much we can do about it,” said Webster Code Enforcement Officer George Winter.

If the town had cojones like Gisel envisions in the president, it could try to have two of the signs removed by enforcing a town ordinance that prohibits signs promoting a specific civic event, like an election, from staying posted for more than 45 days.

No provision in the town code addresses pictures of dogs peeing on people.

But Webster’s approach is probably the safest.

A Delaware town is currently facing a federal lawsuit over efforts to enforce a similar ordinance there limiting the display of political signs to election season. The American Civil Liberties Union is all over it, claiming enforcement is unconstitutional.

The signs in question in that case are anti-Trump and don’t outright reference an election. They read, “Love Trumps Hate” and “No Wall No Ban.”

At this point, Gisel’s signs aren’t so much about an election, either, as they are about being pro-balls, pro-urination and anti-bulls---.

Expressing those sentiments is constitutionally protected.

Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tennessee, explained that while some restrictions may be placed on public speech that potentially infringes on others’ rights, government can’t control or limit what we say.

“The government could have a legitimate interest in not having litter in the community, and that’s where the 45 days comes in,” Paulson said. “But it can never control what those signs say unless they cross another line of the First Amendment, which is obscenity, and there’s no question that those signs are not obscene.”

Free speech is an inseparable element of democracy and worth defending. Where would news columnists be without the First Amendment?

But free speech has no moral compass. The First Amendment isn’t a manual for how to treat our neighbors or behave with decency. Those things are on each of us.

With freedom, our parents told us in adolescence, comes responsibility. Invoking “free speech” to justify shoving vulgarity in the faces of neighbors and children is to avoid responsibility under the guise of being open-minded.

It’s like retorting “It’s a free country!” in a schoolyard dispute. That ends the conversation, when in theory the First Amendment’s right to freedom of expression should enhance public debate.

A mature citizenry need not flaunt its coarsest desires in public because it can. That goes for blaring expletive-laced music with the car windows down and those ubiquitous pro-gun “F--- Cuomo” bumper stickers that have left countless parents struggling to explain their meaning to children in the back seat.

There are plenty of ways to modify the slogans on the Gravel Road signs and get the same point across. “Trump 2016: No More Lies!” “Vote Trump: Finally Someone With Guts!”

Common courtesy has traditionally been regulated by our sense of community and neighborly respect restrained us from indulging our basest yearnings.

That’s the way it used to be anyway, back when America was great.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.