This little bird ruffled some feathers last week. Sweet! Write to us. Tell us how you really feel, so we can share it with our readers!
The Sun also received some angry responses to the first installment in a two-part series on the Solvang City Council’s decision on a proposal to put Pride flag banners up on the city’s light poles during Pride Month in June.
Jan Lipski (who’s uneducated banter can be read on p. 10 this week) and a few others whose rants didn’t make the Sun’s opinion section seem to be under the impression that Solvang isn’t have a Pride parade this year. The city is in fact having a Pride parade this year, it’s second annual.
If you actually read the Sun—and not just hate-read the headlines—you would know that the city decided against hanging rainbow banners around the city and painting two crosswalks with rainbow colors. What those flags have to do with lewd behavior and what one person called “genital mutilation” and “a bunch of people running around half naked with a rainbow thong up their rear-end,” I’m not sure (this person, bravely, signed their rant with only their initials). They’re just flags, people (and they’re not even red). Calm down.
The interesting thing is the amount of anger this fairly benign proposal has pulled out of residents of the Santa Ynez Valley. It makes one thing clear: the hate against LGBTQ-plus community members is real.
And ironically enough, the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office finally announced it was charging the two dumbasses who stole a couple of Pride flags in the Santa Ynez Valley last year, burned one of them on video, and posted it to their favorite social media pages. And guess what? It’s a hate crime! Duh. Why it took almost a year to file charges, I have no idea.
At the same time this hot-button issue of hanging flags around Solvang is pushing its way through town, Ballard Elementary School District is facing controversy over a fourth grader who came out to her class as transgender. Parents and grandparents have been showing up to the school district’s board meetings to complain that their parental rights were violated.
Grandparent rights!
While I can understand the consternation some parents might have about being forced into having a conversation with their child that they really don’t want to have—if you don’t want your child exposed to the real world and the things their peers are facing, it’s your parental right to homeschool.
These parents want the district to adopt a heftier parents rights policy, because being able to opt out of sex education, HIV/AIDS protection education, family life surveys, and state testing isn’t enough. Now, they want to know about every single discussion that could possibly come up, so they can pull their kids out if they don’t like it.
Maybe parents can stand in the corner of the classroom during the school day and object to topics they don’t like or understand. Sounds like a great education!
A fourth grader has every right to come out to her classmates, and would have whether it was in the classroom or on the playground. These parents would have been upset either way, and they seem to be having a way harder time dealing with reality than their children do.
The canary advocates for a parent’s right to be dumb. Send messages to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 6, 2023.