Cancel culture update: Salt City Pride loses venue after barber’s random video tirade | Opinion

It’s hard to have Pride in Hutchinson these days.

In more ways than one.

Hutchinson Pride, the city’s LGBTQ+ group, was unceremoniously ousted from a venue they’d rented for a celebration, called Salt City Pride, including a drag show and storytime.

By itself, it’s not that remarkable. It’s just more of the kind of thing we’ve come to expect in this year of ascendance of anti-LGBTQ+ hatred and persecution here in the Sunflower State.

If you’ll recall, the same thing happened at Towne West Square in Wichita after a certain Republican candidate tried to make an issue of it in the most recent campaign for governor.

And our state Legislature just wrapped up a session marked by a bevy of anti-LGBT laws — passed by a two-thirds majority over a governor’s veto — that are nothing more than pandering to the worst instincts of the most homophobic homophobes Kansas has to offer.

But before we dismiss the Salt City Pride incident as a routine act of prejudice in a prejudiced state in a prejudiced year, a few observations.

Salt City Pride has been an annual celebration since 2018, and this year, they booked the Sand Hills Event Center for it.

The facility manager was delighted and even gave the group a door code to go in and measure the facility to plot out where to set up vendor booths.

But it all came crashing down after a local barber went on the internet in a rambling cellphone video, quoting Bible stories and accusing Pride of devil worship and child molestation.

“In my thoughts it’s demonic,” says Thomas “Tommy” Galindo. “You want to dress up like a girl and you’re a man, but you want to have storybook time with these children in our community that we love dearly, you’re going to have a storybook time on what you do, you’re molesting their mind.”

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t comment on Galindo’s appearance, but it’s germane to this situation. He’s heavily tatted, with a grenade on his bicep and a tattooed-on beard.

By all indications, he wants people to overlook his departure from social conventionality, but he’s unwilling to extend that same grace to others.

Shortly after Galindo posted his video, organizers, sponsors and vendors for the Pride event started getting online hate messages, phone calls and visitors to their businesses. Hutchinson Pride had to go to round-the-clock monitoring of its Facebook page to keep up with the hate-filled messages.

Then they got an e-mail from Sand Hills Event Center.

“We’re planning to pass on this and refund their money,” said the message, passed on from “management” by the employee who rented Pride the facility. “Events that may involve or have potential to involve sexualized content or confusing gender content in an environment for children isn’t something we prefer at this facility.”

The email carried the logo of IdeaTek, a local broadband provider that developed the event center — and the company slogan, “Internet Freedom For All,” which seems more than a bit ironic under the circumstances.

Daniel Friesen, a Reno County commissioner who runs Sand Hills and is the co-founder of Ideatek, sought to distance the broadband company from the mess in an article in the Hutchinson News, citing “an unfortunate error.”

To clarify, this “unfortunate error” wasn’t his company bowing to prejudice and kicking Pride out of the facility they had legitimately contracted to rent. It was that IdeaTek’s logo appeared on the email, which has prompted a backlash from Pride supporters.

He said the center is a “different company” from IdeaTek, which has received millions in federal broadband funding, which is subject to conditions of nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual preference or gender identity.

Funny, but Friesen didn’t claim it was a different company when the business shared this message from the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce on Facebook: “Congratulations to IdeaTek on the opening of Sand Hills Event Center, a new event center and climate controlled storage facility in Hutchinson!”

Hutchinson Pride has found a new venue and the show will go on. But the damage has been done. It’s divided Hutch into opposing camps, boycotting and counter-boycotting each others’ businesses.

But before we leave this issue, let’s return to Galindo, the guy who lit the match. “You’re literally molesting (children’s) mind and there should be a law on this, there’s not yet, but there should be,” he said in the video.

Well, there actually is a law on this. It’s called the First Amendment.

It guarantees the freedom of expression for drag performers to do shows and the parental right to decide whether it’s appropriate for their children to attend. A male in a dress reading children stories about tolerance for others isn’t hurting anybody.

If only someone had done that for Tommy Galindo.