Also: County Assessor Again Accused of Stalking, and Council Presses Pause on Ethics Changes
By Erica C. Barnett
On this week’s Seattle Nice podcast, we had a lively debate over two events held by an anti-trans, anti-choice religious group at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill and at City Hall over the span of four days last week. While Sandeep, David, and I all more or less agreed that the city would have been smart to permit the first event somewhere other than the heart of the city’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood (and I pointed out that the group did not have the required permit to set up a stage, speaker stacks, and diesel generator for its event at City Hall) we parted ways on what David characterized as the protesters’ tactics.
Calling on his past experience as an activist and his read of 1960s history, David said he hoped Mayor Bruce Harrell and his opponent Katie Wilson would “call out the counterprotesters who got arrested,” because their actions play right into the Trump Administration’s hands. Trans protesters and their allies, he argued, should have been thinking of the “voters in swing states” who would see the arrests on FOX news and decide to harden their views against trans rights.
I countered that the very existence of visible trans people in the world is offensive to people who want trans people to disappear, and that we won’t win the votes of bigots by focusing on whether “our” side is being sufficiently civil and demure as they fight for their right to exist.
David and I also disagreed about the implication of the fact that “all 31” of the people arrested were counterprotesters—a data point that that, to me, is just a baseline reality for protests.
I wasn’t at Cal Anderson, where police say some people were throwing plastic water bottles and other items. But I was at City Hall on Tuesday, where officers not only stood by while right-wing provocateurs screamed slurs like “tranny” and “autogynophile” in people’s faces, but provided security for the right-wing activists before, during, and after their unpermitted concert. The arrests I witnessed happened only after police on bikes swarmed to intervene in verbal arguments, escalating isolated conflicts into chaotic mini-melees.
Sandeep agreed with David that the counterprotesters were “dumb shits,” but eventually told us to take it outside because he was tired of hearing us get go around and around about protest tactics (probably fair!)
We also discussed my story about new, disturbing allegations that King County Assessor (and King County Executive candidate) John Arthur Wilson harassed and stalked his ex-partner. Officials and organizations across the county have called on Wilson to step down, but he told KUOW this week that he has no plans to do so.
And we talked about City Councilmember Cathy Moore’s decision last week to withdraw her broadly unpopular proposal to lower ethical standards for city council members, who are currently required to recuse themselves from voting on legislation that presents a financial conflict of interest. Moore, as PubliCola was first to report earlier today, is resigning her position as of July 7.