What 'Demonic Messages' Is New Hampshire Republican Seeing In These Lovely Murals?
What 'Demonic Messages' Is New Hampshire Republican Seeing In These Lovely Murals?
If she's so sure, she ought to be specific.
“If people could see into my heart,” former Littleton, New Hampshire, select board member and state senator Carrie Gendreau told the New York Times, “they would see absolute compassion.”
Of course, existence precedes essence and the only way to actually tell what is “in someone’s heart” is by what they do, and what Carrie Gendreau did was to tear an entire town apart because she thought some pretty, vaguely LGBTQ+ themed murals that had been put up to replace boarded-up windows were sending “demonic messages.” She was also pretty darned upset about a local production of La Cage Aux Folles, because, despite her heart full of beautiful compassion, Carrie Gendreau is a raging bigot.
This weekend, the New York Times published an in-depth look into the turmoil that Gendreau caused in her town, as well as what some might see as her ultimate defeat.
But let’s talk about those “demonic messages,” because I have questions.
“I am very concerned about what is basically creeping into our community,” Gendreau told the Boston Globe last year, explaining that the painting of the iris had “demonic hidden messages” and “demonic symbolism” representing Ishtar, a famous 1987 commercial failure written and directed by Elaine May — who just so happened to also write The Birdcage, the 1996 movie based on La Cage Aux Folles — and starring Dustin Hoffman, who also appeared in 1982’s Tootsie.
Either that or the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, who actually has no known association with irises. But hey! Gendreau was not very explicit about what these demonic messages were, and indeed told people at a town meeting in August of last year that they should “encourage anyone to research what that really means,” and when you “do your own research,” this is the kind of nonsense you might come up with.
Curiously, however, in the New York Times profile, Gendreau claims that her issue with the iris is actually that it represents Iris, the Greek goddess of rainbows.
Ms. Gendreau said she knew, when she first criticized the mural, that most people would not understand — that the iris was a dangerous symbol because Iris was the Greek goddess of the rainbow; that children needed protection from demonic forces threatening to lead them astray.
Rainbows are, of course, evil due to their association with the Muppets.
Surely a singing frog could only be the work of Satan.
It’s almost as if these paintings were not actually sending demonic messages to her or the children or anyone, and she was just upset about them because she is a weird bigot who is apparently obsessed with the teachings of Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, a “Messianic Jew” (otherwise known as a Christian), who wrote a book about how gay rights are leading the United States down a path of “moral decay.”
Because Gendreau had so much power, her nonsense led to many other townsfolk coming out as raging bigots, even going so far as to tell the (now former) town manager that his gay son who died of cancer was burning in hell after he refused to shut down the aforementioned production of La Cage Aux Folles. It also led to the theater group putting on the show deciding to build its own theater instead of renovating the town-owned theater space it had occupied for the last several years, as it had planned.
That sure would have been a nice thing for the town, if they had done that, but now it’s not going to happen because some people had to go and be bigots.
Things are turning around for Littleton. God, very conveniently, told Carrie Gendreau that he didn’t want her to serve on the select board any longer, and when she stepped down, Jordan Applewhite, a transgender 40-year-old who had moved to the town back when it was known to be a nicer place, easily took her spot on the board. The town is also switching to a five-person select board in order to avoid another situation in which one person has that much power to go ahead and ruin everything.
Gendreau is still serving in the state senate, so hopefully God will send her a message, perhaps in the form of a mural, that she should step down from that as well.
EDIT: This article initially stated that Elaine May wrote and directed The Birdcage when in fact she only wrote it, it has been adjusted to reflect that and also to make it more clear that Dustin Hoffman starred in Ishtar, not The Birdcage.
PREVIOUSLY:
Yet another subhuman Republican swine.
When I hear the word "mural" I think of the paintings on the sides of building in the Eastern Market section of Detroit. Wonderful paintings two stories high and half a block wide. These window covering are more like cameos than murals and if someone finds them "demonic" they are either psychotic or attention-whores. Or maybe both.