Hate vs Love at the Chula Vista Library

By now you have probably heard about the nationally known hate group “MassResistance” with ties to anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, and white supremacist activists and values who are bringing their hateful disregard for diversity and our community to a Chula Vista Library event designed to inspire a love of reading for youth. Groups like these echo out long discredited discriminatory views insisting that our community is comprised of predators, perverts, and pedophiles.

The anti-LGBTQ fearmongers our community has long battled have consistently used children as a weapon and wedge against us. The reality of course is that each of us were once young and attempting to understand a world designed to diminish our existence. Many of us have raised, are raising, or hope to someday raise children of our own.

Whether it was the Brigg’s initiative attacking our LGBTQ teachers in 1978, 2008’s Prop 8 message of “protect children and families,” human rights violations like subjecting children to so-called “conversion therapy,” or bringing hate to the doorstep of a children’s event at a library, the historic and repetitious attacks on children from the anti-LGBTQ establishment is clear and must be confronted at every turn. With 40% of homeless youth being LGBTQ identified because their own parents throw them out on the street like garbage as though their mere existence is a moral failure, we know that it is discrimination which must be fought, not diversity and inclusion.

Libraries, learning, reading, science, history, and public education are some of our most powerful tools in the fight for our community’s health, safety, equity, and youth. I am so proud of our local drag queens, the Chula Vista Library, and openly gay, former Chula Vista mayor and current Chula Vista city council member Steve Padilla for supporting this important work. In following their lead by supporting these and similar efforts, we can all take part in this Legacy of Liberation.