Canadian Politics Today

Earlier this year, a Grant, Michigan, high school sophomore won a contest “to brighten up” the middle school health center, according to a statement from Grant Public Schools (GPS). GPS says the student received approval to paint images of “smiling children” and as well as the message “Stay Healthy.”
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At a school board meeting on Oct. 10, parents accused the student artist of promoting witchcraft by including the Hamsa hand as well as the video game character that bears the likeness of a demon. Parents also objected to the use of LGBTQ colors.

“I put my art up there to make people feel welcome,” the student artist said, her voice breaking, in footage captured at the meeting by WZZM-TV, a local news station based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One man at the meeting called the mural “hate material.”
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Tracey Hargreaves, who has two children in the Grant Public School system, came to the defense of the student artist.

“I am a conservative, right-wing, gun-loving American,” Hargreaves declared at the meeting. “And I’ve never seen more bigoted people in my life.”

In an interview with TODAY.com, Hargreaves said, “The meeting turned into a hate fest. Usually there are 10 people at these meetings, 50 showed up. It wasn’t even about the mural ... People were talking about how we need to pray the gay away.”

If they wanted a pride mural, they should have just come out and said so.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other. The Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.

Conservatives had better be ready for it, and Republican politicians, if they want to stay in office, had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder.

On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

I understand some of his complaints but using the power of the state like he wants is nutty.