You seem to be making the assumption that the author's opinions and those of her characters are identical.
No, I am making no such assumption. I quite explicitly state (though not in my first post in this thread) that author intentions are not particularly relevant.
I said nothing more and nothing less that, when listening to the story, I percieved an overt political message. That's not a fact about the author or her politics. It's a fact about me, and about the story, and about the interaction between me and the story.
Which isn't necessarily the case (you can easily think of any number of examples of unreliable or biased or just plain different narrators in literature.) So while the trees have an opinion, it doesn't do justice to the story for us to take it as "overt." Rather, it's an opinion that's filtered through the experience of the story's characters.
I don't understand what you mean by this. "Overt" just means "not concealed". The tree's political message was not hidden, they said it out loud. Does the author agree with it? I don't know. Does the story agree with it? I'd say yes, but I certainly am not saying that it's the only valid view.
Let me be entirely clear. I did not mean to say anything like "This story make's the author's opinions overt" (and I don't quite see how what I did say can be construed as meaning that, though maybe that's my failure to communicate). Far from it. What I was trying to say is "this story contains characters spouting
their own political agendas in an overt manner that does not appeal to me".
I am certainly able to tell apart a character's actions from the author's. If I responded to a horror story on Psuedopod with "I liked this story, except the overt scenes of torture" I would not be accusing the author of actually being a torturer. Why would my saying "I like this story, except the overt political messages" be taken any differently?