Louisiana Voice

Hollywood has made a career of giving us the put-upon person who in the end, turns the tables on the bully and kicks some serious ass.

One of the last persons you’d expect to fill that role would be a quiet librarian in a middle school in Livingston Parish.

But Amanda Jones has had enough of the trash talk from self-righteous loudmouth Michael Lunsford who seems to have nothing better to do with his time than to pick on female librarians, be they in a Livingston Parish middle school or in a public library in Lafayette.

Lunsford, the self-appointed guardian of public morals has taken it upon himself to goad his followers to attack Amanda Jones on social media, depicting her to be some kind of subversive monster bent on turning our children into homosexuals.

In other words, he has a dirty mind and as the old computer adage goes, garbage in, garbage out.

Not coincidentally, it’s the same strategy employed by people like Newt Gingrich, Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Ron Johnson, Gym Jordan, Rand Paul, John Kennedy, and a host of other like-minded political hacks who, lacking legitimate arguments, resort to character assassination and outright lies.

In legal parlance, it’s called defamation. Another word for it is libel.

And when Jones, whose sin was speaking out in opposition to censorship of libraries and of Lunsford and his so-called Citizens for a New Louisiana group, came under a withering attack of lies, inuendo, and accusations of being a pedophile, she began a drive to raise funds to finance the legal costs of going after Lunsford and one of his cohorts, Ryan Thames.

I won’t divulge the amount of money she has raised, but I can tell you it was a significant amount – most likely enough to take the fight to Lunsford and Thames in a defamation and harassment LAWSUIT filed against the two last Wednesday.

Lunsford is president of something called Citizens for a New Louisiana. Thames is a Livingston Parish resident who operates a Facebook page under the alias Bayou State of Mind – and hit behind that cowardly moniker to launch anonymous attacks against Jones. Jones is president of the LOUISIANA ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL LIBRARIANS and also was Louisiana’s co-librarian of the year for 2021.

Among the ABSURDITIES Jones was hit with on social media included claims she was grooming kindergarten children to be gay and that lightning struck her school (apparently some kind of sign from God), causing part of the school to be destroyed by fire.

Well, first of all, she is librarian at a school that teaches fifth- and sixth-graders exclusively. No kindergartners there. Second, the lightning strike was at Live Oak Junior High, a couple of miles from Live Oak Middle School where she is librarian.

And those were just the nice things they said about her.

There are several words that come to mind when the names Michael Lunsford, Ryan Thames, or Citizens for a New Louisiana come up. Despicable, reprehensible, disgusting, repulsive, repugnant, libelous, defamatory, sick, and nauseating are just a few.

And it’s a clear reflection of what’s happening in this country. Where once two sides could sit down and discuss – even debate – issues without resorting to attacks on one’s character.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has a new book called The Destructionists. In that book, he notes that at one time the two major political parties – Republicans and Democrats – could consider each other as opponents – but not enemies.

Then Gingrich and C-SPAN arrived in Congress the same year – 1979. The face of public discourse changed radically after that. Knowing the C-SPAN camera showed only a closeup of the speaker and not the empty House chamber, Gingrich began carpet-bombing fellow members with his incendiary rhetoric.

It was so bad that then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill, in a furious response, said of the brash Georgian, “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people and you challenged their Americanism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

But then Tip had not encountered an orange-haired egotistical grifter named Trump. Gringrich, if anything, was encouraged to step up his attacks with dog-whistle words like “battle,” “war,” “Fight,” “crooks,” “traitors,” and similar rhetoric designed to stir his constituency to a fever pitch. Continuing the practice were people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and more recently, Alex Jones.

That, sadly, is the sorry state to which political discourse has sunken. That’s where we find ourselves today and you can see and hear it in state legislators and now all the way down to parish councils and library boards.

Is this really what we want now? Where kids’ football game where an argument between coaches morphs into gunfire? Where we never know when we send our children off to school if they’ll come home alive?

Lunsford and his ilk are so terrified that “gay” might rub off on straight kids if they read these awful books. Can it really be so bad that the State of Florida actually banned four math text books because of objectionable content? Math?

Two of the books to which Lunsford objected are This Book is Gay and The V-Word. (Perhaps he thought the latter title was his unauthorized biography.)

At any rate, maybe he would be wise to touch base with Alex Jones to get some pointers on formulating a good defense for Jones’s lawsuit.

The last time Michael Lunsford’s name came up was on JULY 27 when I published my second consecutive rant about his efforts to censor libraries in Lafayette and Livingston parishes over what he perceived as efforts by the libraries to indoctrinate children in homosexuality or…

…to offer any literature containing something called critical race theory.

I had introduced his absurd contentions the day before after I attended a meeting of the milquetoast LAFAYETTE PARISH LIBRARY BOARD OF CONTROL (the key word here is “control”) which wilted in its intent to fire head librarian Cara Chance in the face of united opposition to its heavy-handed efforts to carry out Lunsford’s objectives.

Lunsford’s obvious libel of Livingston Parish middle school librarian Amanda Jones, his misspelling of the word “principle,” and his stupid blunder of implying that the lightning strike and ensuing fire at her school was some sort of message from God (wrong school, genius) aside, he plows ahead with his efforts to impose his religious and political beliefs on the rest of us.

The latest project of Lunsford, executive director of the so-called watchdog group Citizens for a New Louisiana, is to convince the University of Louisiana-Lafayette to bring in JACK POSOBIEC to speak at the university in October.

This is Lunsford’s brainchild and there’s a back story we ignore at our own risk — or at the peril of the US Constitution.

Posobiec is one of those hysterical alt-right neo-Nazis sympathizers who has never found a half-baked conspiracy theory he didn’t love. A protégé of Roger Stone and a Qanon adherent, he was a primary moving force behind the absurd “Pizzagate” B.S. that said Democratic politicians participated in a child sex ring run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. (One idiot actually launched an attack on a pizza parlor in the misguided belief that the ridiculous story was true.)

As Earl Long once famously said of the outrageous claims by Willie Rainach and Leander Perez that integration would doom Western civilization: “You never heard such clap-trap in your life.”

Besides offering moral support and giving a platform for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage punk who took it upon himself to travel hundreds of miles to “defend” commercial property during a BLM protest in Knosha, Wisconsin, killing a couple of people in the process, Posobiec has pushed the oft-debunked “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In short, his ideas are repulsive to anyone with half a brain.

But here’s the thing:

A ULL alumnus who protested the appearance on the campus by Posobiec and others who have contacted LouisianaVoice in criticism of his appearance at the request of the campus chapter of Turning Point USA, are playing into Lunsford’s hands.

As distasteful as we may find this human garbage can of toxic political thought, we cannot on one hand lock arms in protesting efforts at censorship and on the other, demand that he not be allowed to set foot on campus.

We are still a free society, despite efforts of encroachment on that freedom (alarmingly successful in places like Texas and Florida), and the First Amendment still has meaning to real patriots.

If we insist that Posobiec be banned, Lunsford wins. It’s that simple. He can then correctly remind us that if we have that right, then he certainly would have the right to ban books he finds objectionable.

We cannot allow him that victory.

The way I see it, there are two options available to those who disagree with Posobiec (and I would fervently hope we have a huge majority on that point):

We can boycott his appearance in the hopeful anticipation that attendance will be sparse and at best, apathetically and indifferently received.

We can show up in large numbers and hoot and jeer and laugh him off the stage.

Barring him from the exercise of free speech, however, is not an option and would cast doubt on the appropriateness of the second option.

Lunsford would love that.

The good Christians at Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy could stand a refresher course on their Bible verses and the teachings of Christianity.

For example, there’s this verse from John, Chapter 6, Verse 37: “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.”

That’s Jesus Christ speaking, in case you didn’t immediately recognize the verse and lots of folks who call themselves God’s people rarely, if ever, crack that book called the Holy Bible. Rather, they just sit in a pew on Sunday morning and nod their heads to the preacher’s words like they actually had a clue what he was talking about. They’ll throw out an occasional “Amen” because it looks and sounds good to those around them.

But somehow, they’re missing the central message of Christianity, which is to love one another and help those less fortunate. I know folks who will get their undies in a wad just because someone else got to church earlier and staked out their regular pew before them.

Or how about this one from Luke, Chapter 6, Verse 42: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye.”

What’s put the burr under my saddle to make me go off on a tangent like this?

The Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy, that paragon of virtue, that monument to all that is holy, has given the boot to a five-year-old kindergartner who lost her father in a workplace accident … because she is now living with her new adoptive parents, a gay couple.

Perhaps the administrators at Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy could brush up on this verse from Romans, Chapter 15, Verse 7: “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring glory to God.”

Hmm. That one seems to hit home.

Here’s one that knocks it out of the park, from First Corinthians (not One Corinthians, Trump), Chapter 13, Verse 13: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.”

Emily Parker and wife Jennie recently adopted Zoey, Jennie’s niece, after Zoey first lost her mother and then her father last September. It was not immediately clear how she lost her mother but Jennie said now Zoey’s losing her school.

The Parkers were called to the principal’s office only two days before the school year started and they were told that because of their lifestyle choices and because Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy is a religious-based school and because students are taught that marriage was between a man and a woman and — well, just because — Zoey’s no longer welcome.

Meanwhile, there’s this breaking news story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/12/fbi-southern-baptist-sexual-abuse/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F37a3e7f%2F62f77646cfe8a216012b1f39%2F5cd6d39eade4e21ae0fd327e%2F42%2F59%2F62f77646cfe8a216012b1f39&wp_cu=5f9eae47041a5f47f1cb6742b761281d%7C889DF7FF94C45EFEE0530100007FB9CA

Here’s another, for good measure, from Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 1: “Judge not that ye be not judged.”

Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy may not be the WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH just yet, but they’ve certainly laid the groundwork.

Earlier Thursday, I sent this photo around to some of my friends (I do still have a few out there) with the caption: All You Need to Know About the GOP.

Turns out I would be proven so very wrong before the sun went down.

And wouldn’t you know it took a couple of Louisiana natives like Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), and House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise to do it – with a little help from the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Before I get too far into this subject, let me offer a disclaimer. I’m certainly no fan of the FBI after what it pulled on LSU professor Steven Hatfield in its BOTCHED INVESTIGATION of those anthrax letters 20 years ago or how it destroyed the career – and life – of Richard Jewell in wrongly naming him a suspect in the Atlanta CENTENNIAL OLYMPIC PARK bombing in 1996.

It’s kind of hard to overlook screwups of such tragic magnitude.

But the raid on Mar-a-Lago was not carried out on the FBI’s initiative. It was not the work of a “rouge” agency, as the US Representative from Louisiana’s 1^st Congressional District would have us believe.

Nor was the raid necessarily a reflection of the FBI’s political politization as claimed by Baton Rouge native and head of what has recently been officially designated as a church Tony “Tattoo” Perkins. (A former Marine, he dislikes having attention called to the tattoo he got during his military days – which is why I bring it up because…well, I’m just that way.)

So, while I’m on the subject of FRC President Tattoo Perkins, let’s just go ahead and get his observations on the raid out of the way because his tirade was briefer than that of Scalise.

Perkins, you will remember is the one who said natural disasters like Katrina were God’s punishment for our debauchery and was His way of trying to get our attention. (That was, of course, before Perkins’s own home was submerged in the flood of 2016.)

About the Raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Perkins tweeted his opposition. “Who trusts the FBI to pursue justice?” he asked. “The agency has become so politicized that even if their actions were justified half the nation still would not trust them.”

Okay, that’s a fair question, given my own suspicions after the Hatfield and Jewell debacles.

But wait. Remember the IRS has officially recognized the FRC as a church, which was already a tax-exempt entity. The church recognition throws up additional shields against having to reveal who its financial supporters are. BUT, with that recognition goes a prohibition against getting involved in partisan politics at the risk of losing that tax-exempt status.

It somehow seems to me that Perkins is treading dangerously close to the edge of that prohibition with inflammatory remarks like that.

I’m all about freedom of expression but when you hide behind the tax-exempt status by calling yourself a church, you necessarily forfeit some of those rights just as do certain other non-profits.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM said pretty much the same thing, lamenting, “Thirty years ago the FBI lost a lot of credibility over the unfortunate events that surrounded Ruby Ridge. Last night as we watched the events that unfolded at Mar-a-Lago, I couldn’t help but think that the FBI and DOJ are losing credibility and the trust of the American people again.”

Also a fair observation. But then Graham went a bit further. “I have no idea what was in former President Trump’s safe, but if the government thought there was something there that belonged to them, they certainly could have asked for it.”

Um…fact is, Rev., they did. The issued subpoenas months ago and Trump simply ignored them.

And of course, that OTHER GRAHAM, Sen. Lindsey, demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland ‘splain himself and justify the raid.

Um…fact is, Lap Dog Lindsey, Garland did in fact say in no uncertain terms on Thursday that he personally signed off on the raid and asked that the court UNSEAL THE SEARCH WARRANT and property receipt and make them public. He gave Trump until 3 p.m. Friday to FILE AN OBJECTION to unsealing the warrant.

Now let’s turn our attention to Thursday’s rant by House Minority Whip STEVE SCALISE on Fox & Friends. You’d never know the man was up for reelection after hearing his half-crazed put-down of the FBI. Then again, given the lily-white uber-conservative district he represents in Jefferson Parish, maybe you would.

No matter. His histrionics Thursday just did not seem to coalesce with the law-and-order message of the former Repugnantcan Party. Rather, he seemed to serve as an echo chamber for the mob that attacked and beat Capitol police on that fateful day in early January 2021 and for those who are now screaming for defunding and dismantling the FBI and issuing death threats against its agents.

“…[I]t concerns everybody if you see some agents go rogue and if you see an agency that doesn’t have the right checks and balances at the top. This is coming from the top.”

“Who went rogue?” asked Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy. “They were following a search warrant.”

“We want to find that out,” Scalise replied.

The Washington Post pounced on the obvious contradiction so evident in the mindset of Repugnantcans like Scalise – evident to everyone but Repugnantcans like Scalise, that is.

“When members of the Supreme Court faced threats after the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade,” the paper pointed out, “Scalise was among Republicans who criticized that response. In fact, he did so on ‘Fox & Friends’, calling for House Democrats to bring to a vote legislation protecting justices. (They did so; it became law.)

“’Any kind of federal judges are not, by law, allowed to be threatened that way,’ Scalise said then, ‘and yet the Justice Department won’t take action. They need to. This is a real concern.’

“The difference is obvious: Who’s making the threats. Threats against Supreme Court justices and protests at their houses (violating a legal statute and spurring Scalise’s excoriation of the Justice Department) came from advocates of abortion access, largely on the left, The Post said.

“Threats against the FBI and those involved in the Mar-a-Lago search are coming from the right. From Scalise’s base. And just as Republicans spent weeks playing along with Trump’s false claims about the election after November 2020, Republicans are now playing along with his insistence that the search is necessarily partisan and illegitimate.”

In poker vernacular, by asking the court to unseal the warrant, Garland has called the bet. Is Trump bluffing? It’s put-up or shut-up time for the former guy. Who will blink first?

The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) has come under a microscope following the death of a two-year-old toddler from “acute fentanyl toxicity” after he ingested pills he found on his mother’s bed. It was the third time the child had swallowed pills and twice before had to be revived by medical workers. The third attempt was unsuccessful.

DCFS had been notified of each incident at the time they occurred but took no steps to protect the child.

LouisianaVoice had a story on Monday about the removal of three children from their parents in Natchitoches after the mother said she was falsely accused of drug use by her in-laws.

Now, a former Department of Juvenile Justice employee, Jerel M. Giarrusso, has come forward with a story of her own experience with the DCFS’s removal of a newborn from his parents, again on the flimsy word of in-laws who claimed in this case the mother failed to take medication during her pregnancy.

Following is her account:

By Jerel M. Giarrusso

Guest Columnist

Several years ago, I was personally involved in a case where DCFS wrongly removed a newborn from his parents in northeast Louisiana.  Let’s refer to the couple as Louis and Anna. The young couple had lived with us for some time and we were like parents to them. 

Anna had a lengthy, nightmarish labor and emergency caesarean delivery, and remained in the hospital for a couple of days after Louis took the infant home.  While she was hospitalized, a social worker accused Anna of being unfit to mother her child after someone (she thinks it was her husband’s mother) alleged she had not taken psychotropic drugs for a mental health condition during her pregnancy.

The hospital staff bought that foolishness, got DCFS and law enforcement involved, and they demanded that she not go home to her own residence with her husband and new baby – and that she have no unsupervised contact with her baby.  Anna’s adoptive father was there and called us repeatedly to keep us apprised of the situation.

To be sure, the meds that Anna did not take had not even been prescribed for her during her pregnancy, as they would have caused severe problems for a developing fetus.  The mental health condition had been diagnosed when Anna was three years old and was probably bogus in the first place. (I have copies of DCFS paperwork regarding her case as a toddler removed from her parents, adopted by another couple, and years later, the situation with her own child.)

Anna went home to her husband and new baby four days after he was born.  Several hours later, three people arrived at their mobile home with a court order, and took the infant away – two DCFS employees and an armed sheriff’s deputy.  The charge for removal of the baby was that Anna had abused him in utero because she did not take certain medications during her pregnancy –  meds that had not been prescribed for her, and would have been dangerous to the baby.  Yep – that’s in writing in the DCFS paperwork – abuse and neglect of the fetus in utero because she didn’t take certain medications.

Anna’s adoptive father hired an attorney to fight this mess. The lawyer was well-intentioned but inexperienced and had no clue how to handle such a case.  I was officially appointed as an advocate for the family under DCFS’s own regulations, so I was supposed to have full access to their records, and could be present and speak for them in court hearings. The one time that I was present in court on their behalf, the two attorneys for DCFS had the judge throw me out.

Louis and Anna did everything the court and the DCFS workers demanded of them.  They took classes on parenting, anger management, whatever they were told.  They were only allowed one visit a month, for one hour each visit.  Although they had moved back to East Baton Rouge Parish, the DCFS staff in Monroe refused to move the case, and the baby, who was in foster care, to EBR, despite the request of the Baton Rouge office supervisor.  Louis and Anna drove to Monroe every month to visit their son, four hours each way.  Sometimes they sold blood plasma to pay for gas for their car.  Several times they were told, after they arrived, that the foster parents couldn’t (wouldn’t) make the child available to them for the one hour visit.  When visits did take place, usually at a McDonald’s restaurant, the foster parents remained present and interfered, until the lawyer intervened and DCFS finally allowed private visits, at the office.

Anna took photos of serious diaper rash and small bruises on her son during some early visits, and complained to DCFS about his condition.  As a result, they were forbidden to have their cell phones in the visits.  The lawyer then made a complaint alleging abuse, with the photos, to the city police.  The baby was then re-assigned to a different foster home. This was about the same time that a St. Tammany Parish foster mother was arrested and charged with the murder of her foster child, after DCFS ignored the birth parents’ repeated complaints that their child was being abused.  The birth parents sued DCFS, of course.  One would think the agency would have taken seriously birth parents’ concerns about abuse of children in their custody.       

DCFS alleged that family reunification was not appropriate because Louis and Anna had not properly bonded with their son.  It’s rather difficult to establish a relationship with a baby when the face time equals 12 hours a year, if that. 

This went on for a couple of years.  I contacted DCFS officials to ask for someone to look into this case and return this child to his parents, taking it as high as the executive office, and I was swatted away.  The family could no longer afford the lawyer, who had been ineffectual anyway.   After about three years, Anna became pregnant again.  Louis and Anna said the DCFS social worker threatened to remove the new baby from them at birth, for no other reason than that their first child was in DCFS custody.  They were finally intimidated into surrendering their son to the state and terminating their parental rights, to protect their second child from the depredations of an out-of-control state agency. 

Throughout this ordeal, Louis and Anna were required to pay child support to DCFS for the privilege of having their child taken from them.  DCFS continued to draft their checking account for child support payments after their parental rights were terminated.  DCFS finally had to refund the money.

Their oldest child was basically kidnapped from this couple.  They have no contact with him.  He is lost to them forever.  Right after the baby was taken from them, I contacted an acquaintance who was a high level DCFS program manager to ask if she could make sense out of the situation.  She looked up the file on the computer, looked me in the eye and said, “hmmm, a healthy white infant…”

 The significance of that remark is that the Children’s Bureau supports programs, research, and monitoring to help eliminate barriers to adoption and find permanent families for children. The Children’s Bureau provides funding to states and tribes to help them support families who adopt from foster care (Emphasis added). “We provide additional funds to states that achieve a high number of adoptions of children from foster care,” its web page says.

I was told that Louisiana has had a very high success rate in achieving adoptions from foster care. The federal government pays state agencies accordingly. The word that came to my mind, not anyone at DCFS, was “bounty.”

There is a ready market for the adoption of “healthy white infants” in all 50 states.  When people adopt from state foster care, they do not wait forever — nor do they pay tens of thousands of dollars to attorneys for private adoptions.