“We can agree to disagree on things,” said Rees, bemoaning the profanity-laced messages he said were left at his house. “It is just sad that we as a nation, we as a people, we as a human race have come to that.” 

He made a special point that it was “okay” for him to receive such messages, "but when my wife and grandkids have to bear it and listen to it, it's not right.”

Perhaps Rees’ wife, Linda Rees, shouldn’t have to listen to that kind of harassment. But is it all right for her to dish it out? 

Earlier at the same meeting, Linda Rees, sitting in the second row of seats just behind me, took the opportunity, after the last line of the Pledge Of Allegiance —“… with liberty and justice for all” — to lean in and say, in my ear, “Except you.” 

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Let that sink in. The wife of Winter Garden’s mayor told me I don’t deserve liberty or justice.   

I guess we "have come to that."

America is an ideal. It starts with “all men are created equal” and extends to “equal protection under the law.”  While our country has repeatedly failed to live up to its promise — to women, to people of color, to the LGBTQ+ community, to the poor, to veterans, to the disabled, the homeless — it is an ideal that the best among us continue to strive for nonetheless. 

Along with a free press, our legal protections — presumption of innocence, the rights to remain silent and to have an attorney when accused of a crime, the freedoms from unreasonable search and seizure and “depriv[ation] of life, liberty or property without due process of law” — are among the factors that set the United States apart from authoritarian regimes where people, particularly those who dissent, can disappear into the night and fog without a trace. 

As a political spouse, Linda Rees’ comment isn’t just unseemly, it’s antithetical to these core values. Percolating through our community, ideas like hers begin to undermine the foundational principles of our democracy.  

They are enabling the elimination of due process to facilitate mass deportations. 

They are encouraging people to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and inform on their neighbors if they suspect they are in the country illegally. 

They are allowing for undocumented people to be disappeared to developing nations with questionable human rights records. 

They are allowing people to be swept up in ICE raids while at work or waiting at immigration courts.  

They are allowing people to be held in unsafe, unsanitary and inhumane conditions without their family knowing where they are. 

They are allowing ICE to profile and detain Americans because they are Hispanic. 

They are allowing for exploring the revocation of birthright citizenship and stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship and removing them from the country. 

To step back to the mayor’s original complaint, yes, a steady stream of F-bombs and physically impossible suggestions for how one might auto-pleasure oneself is, obnoxious and disconcerting. But really, profanity is just words, easily tuned out or countered with any number of playground comebacks. Sticks and stones … readily comes to mind. 

But Linda Rees’ idea that some people are not worthy of liberty and justice — that is some deep-level anti-American thinking. 

Her Except you comment — picked up by VoxPopuli’s recording of the meeting — is uglier and more insidious than any cluster of F-bombs. Her words not only strike against hallowed American values and degrade the city commission proceedings, they stoke division and corrode the bonds of community just as her husband, the mayor, is calling for more civility in discourse. 

And really, that’s what’s sad.