If your kid comes running up and presents you with a drawing, then asks how good is it, the only response within your heart is to heap praise upon their efforts and enthuse about how truly wonderful it truly is. It also will of course go up on the fridge or pin board. If an earlier draft is already there, then the date is recorded and that gets safely tucked away.
What if it is not your kid?
Would you instantly revert to art critic mode and verbally tear it to shreds?
I can well imagine some might, but most of us would not.
If however you were a deeply committed Christian and could see something that is supposedly satanic in the picture, then all bets are off. Instead, being an obnoxious arsehole is for some the default mode. That’s basically our sorry saga for today.
Sorry Christians, but when you do this stuff, this is the message you are very clearly sending. If you have the raw gall to top and tail it with, “Hate the sin but love the sinner”, those of a far more decent disposition will immediately think “Bullshit, you are just a hateful bigot”, but will most probably not tell you that and will instead leave you to wallow in self-generated muck.
The mural at the Grant Middle School Health Clinic in Michigan
Via NBC news we have the details of what happened.
First, let me show you what all the fuss is about. Before we get into the details, I’d like you to take a good look.
- Do you, as a normal decent human, see anything at all that is inappropriate?
Here is the supposedly “satanic” mural that was created within the middle school health clinic …
As a mural designed to welcome anybody and everybody, no exceptions, to the health clinic, it works really well. I’m not writing that because it’s a nice thing to say, but because it is both true and wholly factual.
You truly do need to be a total arsehole to piss all over it verbally, but hey, we are talking about Conservative Christians. These days that is very much their well established modus operandi.
What is the backstory here?
The school ran a contest to create a mural for the middle school health centre.
The winning submission contains happy smiling children and the central tag “Stay healthy”.
To also ensure that everybody is welcome and nobody is excluded, we can see one student in the image has rainbow colours and another has a trans T-Shirt.
For Conservative bigots such inclusiveness is a bit of a triggering concept. That however was not the whole problem. If you look carefully, and you really do have to look very very hard, then you can see the following as well …
- In the middle left there is a character from the very popular video game Genshin Impact
- On the far left there is also a Hand of Mary, a palm-shaped design. It has been a well-recognised symbol of protection for multiple centuries.
The above were both declared by the ignorant Conservative bigots to be “Satanic”.
The Next School Meeting was a hate fest
The student artist attended. There, on Oct 10, she carefully explained it all.
Those attending carefully listened, absorbed her explanation, nodded in an accepting way, and then moved on to the next item on the agenda.
Hell no, we are dealing with clueless deeply superstitious gobshites who lack all empathy. They had turned up with the pitchforks and so happily deployed them.
This is what actually happened …
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.”
Another adult at the meeting said, “I feel like (she) did a really good job finding excuses to defend the things you put on. None of us are that stupid.”
One lady dismissed everything she said to explain it all with “None of us are that stupid.”
I agree lady, you are even more exceedingly stupid than that.
As the young artist struggled to explain, they refused to listen and so she ran out of the meeting in tears.
She was just a middle school kid, and yet there they all were, refugees from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, literally accusing her of Witchcraft and Satanism.
One parent defended her …
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.”
…
“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.”
“I had to stand up and say something,” Hargreaves added. “It was out of control. You can’t catch gay, honey. It’s not contagious.”
Yep, she truly nailed in.
Did this really happen as described above?
Indeed yes. A local TV crew, 13 On Your Side, captured it all on camera, including the above reported remarks …
What Finally Happened?
The meeting ended without any conclusion.
Later there was a compromise.
As agreed with the artist, the symbols, including the Hand of Fatima and the video game character are to be removed, but the rest remains.
The draft she had submitted did not have those in it. As she created it she had been left with empty spaces, hence decided to pop the symbols in to fill the gaps.
Meanwhile the Mural really does work
Here is people a positive note to end on with this one …
Lori Donati, who works at the middle school health center where the mural is displayed, told NBC affiliate WOOD-TV, which is based in Grand Rapids, earlier this month that she was “thrilled” with the result.
“Everyone’s accepted at our clinic,” Donati said. “What she (the artist) was trying to say (is that) everyone’s accepted no matter what your background is or who you are. You are loved and accepted and that’s exactly our philosophy with our office, too.”
Further Reading
James Finn does an excellent insightful job discussing the raw bigotry that this has surfaced …