Media

Jack Lessenberry Has An Interesting Tale Of The Woman Who Wants to Ban Metro Times

July 28, 2014, 4:57 PM

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Jack Lessenberry

 

Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry has an interesting tale to tell about the Grosse Pointe Park woman who wants her city to ban the Metro Times because it has sexually oriented ads.

In a column for Michigan Radio, he writes that he met Andrea Lavigne, about 10 years ago when she sat in on media survey classes he was teaching at Wayne State University.

Lessenbery writes:

She was in her late 30s or early 40s, and seemed to be searching for answers. She wanted to know how the media work, and told me she was a Maoist. This fascinated me, because I thought authentic Maoists were almost as rare as passenger pigeons.

Chairman Mao, we now know, starved to death and slaughtered tens of millions of his own citizens, and kept China economically and intellectually backward. Intrigued, I got together one night before class with her and another Maoist, to find out what they were all about. Alas, they spouted a form of primitive, grade-school Marxism.

They seemed to have very little historical knowledge of Communism or what it had actually been like.


Andrea Lavigne of Grosse Pointe Park. (Facebook photo by Valerie Jean)

He writes that three years ago he got an email from her saying that she'd founded a marijuana film club. Lavigne, whose Facebook profile says she's 49, is crusading to get Grosse Pointe Park to outlaw Metro Times because of its sex ads.

Tonight, she plans to appear before the city council in her affluent little town to ask them to ban the paper entirely and “require its removal from city sidewalks and local businesses.”

The government could ban anything in Maoist China. But you can't do that in America, which is what makes this a great country. Well, I guess Ms. Lavigne wasn’t in my class the night I talked about the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,  the one that means that the freedom of the press is one of our most fundamental rights.


Read more:  Michigan Radio


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