The ongoing debate about the removal of the Labor Department mural, depicting labor’s clashes with owners about conditions and pay, is a sign of the governor’s ineptitude. The department’s business and name is about labor, and so is the mural.

Has the governor forgotten that the vast majority of Maine residents/voters are providers of labor? It does not seem a very smart political move to rile the voters that way.

Instead of causing a division between the citizens, he might have done the opposite and suggested that the mural might be relocated and extended, modified to show the contributions of business and entrepreneurs in this state, showing that we are mutually dependent.

A senior state law officer has suggested that the removal is a matter of freedom of speech. That may be so, but where in the First Amendment does it permit the denial of free speech to others in order to express your own?

Peter van Oosten, Greene