The anti-LGBTQ group MassResistance is boasting of its role supporting a Texas group in its war with a local library over a pair of Pride Month displays that MassResistance claims “targeted children with psychologically intrusive homosexual propaganda.”
Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the efforts of Joe Goodson of the Temple, Texas-based Concerned Christian Citizens to fight his local library over the LGBTQ displays, with the help of MassResistance:
Goodson started his crusade last June, when he found out that the local library had two LGBT displays up. One, a bulletin board decorated with rainbows, had a flier reading “Be inspired: Celebrate pride month” as well as materials on the board stating that June was recognized by the American Library Association as LGBT book month. The second display was a table near the children’s desk that included informational sheets that had books with LGBT themes divided into age groups. Some of the books were on display on the table.
According to a January 5 article in the Temple Daily Telegram, the display received little feedback until an August 4 Facebook post by CCC that criticized it. Some 20 residents spoke in favor and against the displays at an October meeting of the library board.
The Temple library board had another meeting about the subject in late January. Goodson took to the meeting a petition that had been circulated by Texas MassResistance’s Robert Oscar Lopez insisting that the library “refrain in both policy and practice from further advocacy regarding sexual and moral issues and practices, like homosexuality, proven to be dangerous and deemed to be immoral by the large percentage of local residents who hold to biblical and traditional values.”
At the meeting, activists affiliated with Concerned Christian Citizens and MassResistance presented the board members with a copy of “The Health Hazards of Homosexuality,” a new book by MassResistance founder Brian Camenker.
In a recent blog post about the meeting, MassResistance said that its allies were urging the library to adopt a “neutral” display policy, meaning that any information about LGBTQ people would also have to include information about the “dangers of those behaviors”:
That ignited both sides to come to the January meeting to influence that policy. The Concerned Christian Citizens want no homosexuality in the library, but are demanding at the very least that any library displays be neutral; if there is LGBT “information” there must also be information describing the severe medical, psychological, and moral dangers of those behaviors.
Camenker has argued that “there is a place for being insulting and degrading” in the fight against LGBTQ rights, an attitude that his group displayed in its blog post about the Temple meeting. The post includes a photo of a supporter of the library displays, whom MassResistance identifies as a “tranny with a deep male voice” who is intent on “hijacking Christianity for immoral purposes.”
MassResistance also suggests nefarious motives on the part of the librarians who created the Pride displays and those who are supporting them:
But also, there is something very eerie about adults who support sexual perversions going to these extreme lengths to force other peoples’ children to be given their propaganda. Why are these adults so obsessed with other people’s children? That always must be confronted.
The Massachusetts-based MassResistance has in recent years been setting up outposts throughout the country and the world, including the Texas chapter headed by Lopez.
