MADISON- On Friday, a Republican lawmaker admitted to stealing an 80-year-old man’s protest sign. State Rep. Dale Kooyenga allegedly stole the sign because it violated the “decorum” of the State Capitol Building. The sign, which criticized the GOP, was apparently offensive to Kooyenga because it contained the words “groper” and “damn.” Kooyenga stated that he did not feel that children touring the capitol should be able to see such ‘inappropriate’ words.
Kooyenga’s heist is particularly interesting because of his support for recent campus speech policies. Kooyenga has repeatedly supported bills intended to promote right-wing politics. These bills have often been disguised as promoting free speech, when all they really do is crack down on protest by leftists.
Scott Anderson at the Caledonia Patch reports:
State Rep. Dale Kooyenga, a Republican from Brookfield, was caught on Capitol surveillance footage removing the 80-year-old Donald E. Johnson’s legally permitted sign in May.
Kooyenga went public with the heist by releasing the police report to the public — but said he only did so because Democrats were “trying to obtain the [same] report and he wanted to get out ahead of them.”
The sign read:
Never Forget: Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and many WI republican legislators support a corrupt, treasonous health care wrecking, lying incompetent, unethical, narcissistic, immoral tax and draft-dodging, sadistic, racist and confessed serial groper who thinks nothing about spending millions of taxpayer dollars for his golfing and luxury family vacations and even more billions for a senseless wall, a bogus voter fraud study and excessive military buildup all while cutting taxes for giant corporations, himself, his family and his billionaire buddies at the expense of millions of people on ObamaCare, veterans, veteran’s children, education, the elderly, the poor, school lunches, environmental protections, national parks, wildlife, scientific research and so on and We the people be damned!
“In my view, the sign was inappropriate in several ways and I felt it should not be in plain view of the scores of schoolchildren who were touring the Capitol at that time,” Kooyenga said in a statement. “It was not my intention to cause harm to the owner of the sign and I returned it immediately when I was asked for its return.”
Read more at the Caledonia Patch.
