Florida GOP Hopeful Feels Personally Attacked By Rainbows

Back in the 1980s and early ’90s, a great many cartoon villains found themselves and their evil plans thwarted by the power of the rainbow. Murky Dismal stood no chance at turning the world dark and gray if Rainbow Brite had anything to say about it. And anyone who crossed the Care Bears ran the risk of of getting caught in the infamous Care Bear stare.

Perhaps this is just one reason why the absolute worst people in the country are freaking the fuck out about rainbows these days. Well, that and they’re violent homophobes and transphobes.

On Friday, activist Lauren Windsor shared a video to Twitter of Anthony Sabatini, the chairman of the Lake County (Florida, natch) Republicans who is currently running for Congress, giving a truly bizarre speech about how Pride month and rainbows are “anti-Christian hate speech.” Because it’s anti-Christian for LGBTQ+ people either to exist or to not hate themselves.

He said:

“There’s a Great Reset going on. And I say, well, if you look around, really, I think the Great Reset is a gay reset. I mean, if you look at Pride Month, that’s pretty much, like, the whole program.

“What can we do about Pride Month? Right? Because a lot of people are like ‘Well, it’s annoying, it’s annoying that there’s a Pride month, but there’s really nothing we can do.’

“Or worse, more impotently, I hear people say ‘I just don’t shop during Pride Month. You know. I just don’t shop. I should just avoid that.’ Right.

“And this is the historic defense mindset of the Republican Party, which is avoid, defend, deflect, walk away, ignore. And we can’t do that anymore. We have to end Pride Month, Okay?

“We have to crush Pride Month. It has to go away. And I know what you’re thinking. ‘Well it’s like private sector, private sector business.’

“‘I learned in my 1980s sort of neocon Heritage Guide that private sector businesses can do whatever they want. We’re not supposed to do anything on that. We’re just supposed to ignore that.’ No, no, no, no, no. 

“It’s time to crush Pride Month and the businesses that promote that toxic anti-American garbage.”

Sabatini then suggested that Florida could make it immediately illegal for any county, school board, city commission or any local entity to spend any money on Pride. He whined about the city of Mount Dora spending “tens of thousands of dollars” on rainbow banners up and down the street, which I suppose we can assume were fashioned out of vicuna wool, and said it should be made immediately illegal to spend any taxpayer dollars on Pride.

Then he said that he wanted to replace Pride Month like Republicans were supposed to repeal and replace Obamacare.

“First we need to crush Pride Month,” he continued. “We need to bend our civil rights laws to make it actionable legally for when they do do that because it’s an anti-Christian hate symbol.”

That is where the video ends, so we don’t get to know what he planned to replace Pride month with, but given his fear of rainbows, we can assume it is beige.

Sabatini also failed to explain how it is an anti-Christian hate symbol. Perhaps because it reminds people like Anthony Sabatini that their version of Christianity means hating a whole class of people and they would like all of those people to disappear so that they don’t have to feel like the gross bigots they are? Is it that he thinks that people who do not subscribe to his version of his religion are still required to adhere to its tenets? Truly, it’s not clear.

But he’s not the only one who is afraid of Rainbows. The Wisconsin teacher who was told that her elementary school students would not be allowed to sing a Miley Cyrus/Dolly Parton song called “Rainbowland,” about a utopian land where everyone is happy and can be themselves, because rainbows are “controversial,” was fired this week on the grounds that posting about it on social media made the school look bad. Which, you know, it was.

“Ms. Tempel deliberately brought negative attention to the school district because she disagreed with the decision as opposed to following protocol and procedure and I believe that behavior is intolerable,” Waukesha School District Superintendent James Sebert, who has been accused by the Alliance for Education in Waukesha of a pattern of discriminating against LGBTQ+ students, said at the hearing.

So far this year, there have been zero reports of anyone actually being murdered by a rainbow.

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