By all account, Jim Gleason is a good man who always wanted to do right by his community. For over three years, Gleason had acted as town manager for Littleton, N.H., working diligently to serve his fellow neighbors. All of this changed recently after a row with one of his constituents over a number of paintings that had been commissioned by a local LGBTQ group.
It began first when one of the board members, Carrie Gendreau, had labelled the paintings as “demonic”. Her responsibilities as a state senator are, in her words, “informed” by her religious faith, which simply means that she has theocratic justification for spewing hatred. If this would have been the only pushback, it would not have been sufficient to merit a resignation. After all, religious people are always calling things they dislike “evil”. The unpleasantness that led to him quitting was the result of something far nastier. A woman by the name of Jean Chouinard visited him, and things did not go well:
Jean Chouinard came to Gleason’s office in October to complain about a production of La Cage Aux Folles by Theater UP at the municipally owned Littleton Opera House. She wanted Gleason to shut it down. He said he couldn’t because it would be an infringement of First Amendment free speech rights but told Chouinard she could exercise her own rights by protesting the show. She then called him weak and asked if he was pleased that his son Patrick, who died of cancer in 2016, “was in hell with the devil where he belonged.
Not long after the incident, this hateful bitch also sent a picture of him with the words “Queer Bastard” written across it. The fact that she admitted to sending it allowed Gleason to file a restraining order against her.
Meanwhile, state rep Carrie Gendreau defended her actions, and has zero sympathy for a man being harassed for allowing the citizens he worked for the opportunity to express themselves. It’s just another sad example of how religion makes people into hateful monsters with no understanding of just how messed up their behavior is. Now, the city of Littleton is a poorer for losing such a committed member of government. This is how Christian nationalists win: they make the world unpleasant for everyone, and when there’s no one left to rule, they simply take over and impose their faith on the rest of us. Expect this kind of thing to happen more and more.