CatholicVote’s “Hide the Pride 2023” is showing up even in America’s wealthiest and most progressive cities.
A recent op-ed for the CT Insider decried “acts of bigotry” – including “Hide the Pride” – in one of New England’s poshest enclaves. The author was John Breunig, an editor with Hearst Connecticut Media Group (which owns multiple media outlets in Connecticut).
Local news outlets reported that the Greenwich City Town Hall’s outdoor Pride flag was surrounded in the early morning hours of June 5 by 25 law signs reading “Groomers.” Reporters described the signs as “homophobic.”
According to Breunig, the “groomers” signs were not the only problem.
In the hours after “groomers” signs made their cameos, someone chose another alternative at Perrott Library. The [LGBT children’s] books the Greenwich Patriots [a conservative coalition] questioned were all taken out on loan.
“It fits the profile of the ‘Hide the Pride’ campaign that calls on parents to put their library cards to use by clearing displays during Pride Month,” Breunig surmised.
“The signs can be pulled from the soil, but bigotry and nonsense keep sprouting like weeds,” he said.
Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, wrote on his Facebook page that “liberal schoolmarms” like Breunig are “unintentionally hilarious.”
Breunig has upbraided Connecticut parents in the past for their efforts to remove pornographic content from school libraries. Earlier this June, a school board in Newtown, CT, rejected parents’ calls to pull two books, “Flamer” and “Blankets,” from circulation.
“Flamer,” a graphic novel by Mike Curato, includes illustrations of group masturbation sessions and gay teen fantasies. “Blankets” is an autobiographical graphic novel. Craig Thompson illustrates child genitalia and sexual abuse, as well as his own first sexual relationship.
Both books appear on CatholicVote’s “Hide the Pride” list of material that does not belong in young adult sections of public or school libraries.
Breunig lamented that books like these have been “challenged,” and called on local children to reject their parents’ efforts to protect them:
With challenges surfacing in other towns, including Darien, Westport, Brookfield and Fairfield, more teens may need to rally to give the adults in the room a reality check.
He also suggested that the parents who object to the books struggle with reading:
It’s no coincidence that they are both graphic novels. It took generations of warnings to get people to quit smoking. It took the invention of a toy phone to get them to stop reading. So it’s a lot easier to judge graphic novels by their covers without having to trip over all those pesky words.
Breunig recently explained that parents who participate in efforts like “Hide the Pride” or school board protests not only lack education and intelligence – they’re acting out of fear.
“They are afraid of kids with identity issues they find threatening, becoming empowered through words and art they find at their local library,” he wrote. “So they try to bully librarians.”
Fortunately for Breunig’s and the Newtown school board’s peace of mind, there wasn’t much demand from teens for these books in the first place. According to the same op-ed:
It’s a lot of noise over two books that are gathering dust on the high school shelves, particularly since “Blankets” was only checked out once and “Flamer” never was.
For the one kid who will miss out on “Blankets” this year, the librarian might try pointing him in the direction of an actual classic instead.
