Week in Review: "PRIDE" Comes to Town

June 15, 2023

Week in Review

PRIDE in Hillsdale County

If you haven’t heard, June is what a small minority and their corporate sponsors call “Pride Month,” and Hillsdale County’s leftist institutions are busy blitzing unsuspecting residents with a demoralization propaganda campaign to transform them into “allies.” See a few examples below:

• Taking up the mantle is Hillsdale County’s “Great Start Collaborative,” a nonprofit operating with funds from the Michigan Department of Education. Great Start purports to assist in the education of babies and small children.

• Fether Studios featured “LGBTQIA+ Pride Month” in its June newsletter. In order to extend “allyship,” the studio is offering pride “unity/peace” symbols or flags for private individuals and businesses alike to put in their windows. Do not fear, however, the proprietors assure us that they “do not see this as a political move.”

• The Hillsdale Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), “a specially trained community volunteer appointed by our family court judge to speak up for the best interests of an abused or neglected child,” appears to have acquired a PRIDE flag. One can see the rather disturbing implications of such a gesture from this particular organization for both children in this system and parents who would like their children not to be. . .

• Visionary “LGBTQ+ support” activist Christine Terpening has come to town, and she brings with her organization and “wonderful allies” who will “shut you down in an embarrassing manner” if you question her practices. See more on Ms. Terpening’s endeavors, past and future, in Fauxglin’s links below.

Library Board Meeting, June 8

The library meeting was quiet and uneventful. The contentious reconsideration request was once again put off until Mayor Stockford appoints someone to the fifth library board position.

In non-book related news:

• Citizens of Hillsdale will be happy to know that the Facebook reach of the library continues to grow. The library was even able to achieve the coveted “Sponsored Post” with one of its posts, further expanding its reach. Thankfully, the social media presence of Hillsdale Community Library seems to grow month after month. Whether this will lead to the reading of books is still unclear.

• “Rhonda with Yoga”—an adult yoga class – continues to meet weekly. Due to a library staff member leaving, the kids’ version – Little Sprouts Yoga – will be discontinued. As an alternative, we encourage parents to send their kids outside to play this summer.

• Some of the carpets in the library were cleaned better than ever. The cleaning was so good that the hunt is on for pictures of the old stains to post “Before” and “After” pictures, potentially further extending the social media reach of the library.

• The opportunity for receiving government grants continues! If the LSTA grant is received, the money would go towards creating a “Library of Things” – a collection of items that the public can check out for use, including outdoor yard games, recreational activities, and craft items. The top item checked out at other libraries is the Nintendo Switch.

Upcoming Events

• Today, June 15 at 10:00 AM: Michigan Library Association Connect Advocacy Hour: Updates from the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom.¹ Join Deborah Caldwell-Stone,² Director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and Executive Director of The Freedom to Read Foundation, for this Zoom event. Debbie has been an “ally” for many decades, and is routinely interviewed by prestigious legacy media outlets to speak of the horrors of “book banning,” i.e., choosing some books and not all books. As a defender of “intellectual freedom,” Deb remains committed to exposing children to mature content and, we anticipate, will stupefy all present with thinly-veiled legal threats. “Plan to bring your questions and join the conversation!”

• Monday, June 19 at 7:00: City Council meeting. After ample time for deliberation, Mayor Stockford must surely nominate his candidate for the fifth library board seat.

• Tuesday, June 20: Don’t miss the SAFETY FAIR at the county fairgrounds. Co-sponsored by the Great Start Collaborative, children will presumably learn to avoid tobacco products, wear helmets as often as possible, and above all, be nice at any cost.

  

External Links

• “Cormac McCarthy . . . died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., on June 13, his son, John McCarthy, confirmed to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. He was 89.” Via Publisher’s Weekly. See Walter Kirn’s comments on PBS and Cyril O’Regan’s 2019 essay, “Cormac McCarthy and the Founding Violence That Never Ends.”

• “Despite the love I have for my community, and the support they’ve given me, I felt suffocated because of the prevailing conservative beliefs regarding the LGBTQ community that many political and faith leaders in West Michigan hold.” A freshman at Columbia (not too far from Rockefeller Center) attacks her hometown of Holland, Michigan and its churchgoing populace for their retrograde views. Expect to see more of this sort of thing as Michigan Democrats gear up for a renewed attack on the state’s rural counties.

• “It was the perfect place to start a rural revolution, and I’m making these kids know that their hometown is a place where they can be who they are.” Thus said a certain Christine Terpening in a January interview with Lansing’s City Pulse. As founder of I’ll Be Your Rock—which has recently opened a chapter in Hillsdale—Terpening’s mission is to plant the rainblow flag in every rural town in Michigan, and to ensure that rural children, with or without the permission of their parents, at least have access to “private Facebook groups” where they can speak with (adults?) about their sexuality.³

• “The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset. Gender identity is real.” So wrote federal judge Robert Hinkle, a Clinton appointee, as he blocked a recently passed and signed Florida law [SB 254] which proscribes the prescription of “puberty blockers” and “cross-sex hormones” to minors.

• “It’s wrong that extreme officials are pushing hateful bills targeting transgender children, terrifying families, and criminalizing doctors. These are our kids. . . . Not somebody else’s kids; they’re all our kids.” During a press conference last Thursday, President Biden indicated that the federal government is prepared to use its immense power to trans as many of your children as possible. It’s not the first time Biden has claimed your children as wards of the administrative state.

• “This issue has put some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots.” Democrat Councilwoman Kristin Mink (Montgomery County, MD) has noticed that hyphenated Americans, especially Muslims, are becoming ever-so-publicly annoyed by the firehose of LGBT propaganda with which the “fake and ghey” regime assimilates their children. Something similar is happening in certain suburbs of our very own Detroit, suburbs which have had the audacity to elect an “all-Muslim” city council.

• “It’s never a good sign when parents and their supporters have to resort to throwing punches at weirdos in the street . . . this is not going away . . . we’ve seen the flags flying from official government buildings . . . what was once a symbolic gesture turned into an official religion, and a pagan one at that.” In Glendale, CA last Tuesday, Armenian-Americans clashed with an all-too-white coalition of Antifa and LGBTQ activists, causing the gentlemen of The American Mind to wonder whether a wrench might be thrown into the works of the Dem’s “ethnic machine politics.”

• “Gender-affirming care is . . . a human experiment on children and teens, the most vulnerable patients. Ignoring the long-term dangers posed by unrestricted off-label dispensing of powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, combined with the large overdiagnosis of minors as gender dysphoric, borders on child abuse.” Gerald Posner writing in the Wall Street Journal.

• “It will ensure that queer couples no longer have to pay more out of pocket to start families than non-queer families.” The California legislature is contemplating a bill that would “remove financial barriers to surrogacy parenting for gay men” in an effort to establish “Fertility Equality” in the state.

• “What’s going on is very silly, but the silliness is distracting us from very important things. That’s the nature of the evil.” Peter Thiel received the New Criterion’s tenth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society. The sometime members of the Homeless Task Force, who perhaps worry about aiding and abetting the “homelessness-industrial complex,”⁴ will be especially interested in paragraphs 12-15, and enthusiastic supporters of Governor Whitmer’s plan to poach “every woman engineer” from Indiana and Ohio may be given pause by 21-22.

• “We have been treated to a ‘flood the zone’ legal harassment campaign unrivaled in American history.” President Trump has been indicted over what he is calling the “Boxes Hoax.” National Review says the indictment is “damning,” but Ohio Sen. JD Vance plans to “grind [the DOJ] to a halt” in response.

• Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed legislation [HB 3062] requiring “lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of executive orders or state laws to be filed in either Cook or Sangamon county,” both of which are Democratic strongholds.

Farewell

We leave you with this paragraph from Jon Askonas’ excellent essay on “Piety, Technology, and Tradition.”

I can hand down my faith to my son, but I can’t hand down a world where pornography is not instantly available to him at every moment. I can hand down my love of reading and some of my favorite books, but I can’t hand down to him an American society of broad literacy. I can hand down a love of English choral music, but not a world in which his local Episcopal or Anglican church has a choir worthy of that tradition. I can hand down my traditions, but the environment in which he finds himself will greatly shape, maybe definitively shape, my son’s engagement with them. My handing down better account for it, and in my having to decide what to do amidst radical change, I will have gone beyond conservation alone.

1. For more reading, peruse the ALA’s Code of Ethics, which declares that the organization works “to recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases; to confront inequity and oppression; to enhance diversity and inclusion; and to advance racial and social justice in our libraries, communities, profession, and associations through awareness, advocacy, education, collaboration, services, and allocation of resources and spaces.”

2. A name as fitting as Vonnegut’s Diana Moon Glampers.

3. Terpening is a veteran of school board “book banning” wars in Vermontville.

4. Georgia has passed, and Governor Kemp has signed, Senate Bill 62, which audits nonprofits that “serve” the homeless and requires local government to enforce its anti-camping ordinances.