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Grandinetti Should Have Spoken Out

on Sex, Family, Before the Election

By Mike Hudson

If Kristen Grandinetti wants to have sex outside of marriage, get an abortion or fall in love with another woman instead of a man, we say more power to her. But when she attacks and belittles a faith held by most of our readers, she's clearly crossed the line. Grandinetti is pictured here with newly elected Councilmen Andrew Touma and Charles Walker, The three have been called the new council majority. Touma ironically is the president of the St. John De LaSalle Catholic Church Parish Council.

City Councilwoman Kristen Grandinetti, incensed about an article that appeared in last week's Niagara Falls Reporter concerning the timing of her public announcement about leaving the Catholic Church, has fired back, using her Facebook page to attack the paper.

"Well...the NF Reporter has crossed yet another line" Grandinetti wrote. "Only this one is a little more obnoxious than usual. Whoever it is that pretends to be my friend and then scurries back to the Reporter like a little rat...get a life."

Apparently the councilwoman, who often appears confused, is laboring under the misapprehension that some false friend of hers informed us that she had abandoned Catholicism in favor of Episcopalian faith.

In reality, our source of information was her Facebook page, where she regularly posts her thoughts to her 1,199 Facebook friends.

On Nov. 10, just five days after coasting to a re-election victory in the City Council race, Grandinetti posted a photograph of the Episcopalian Church of the Good Shepherd in Buffalo.

"My new spiritual home," Grandinetti wrote beneath the photo. "Though it saddened me to leave the Catholic Church after more than 50 years, I am now a member of a church who loves and welcomes all. I am a proud Episcopalian. This is the Church of the Good Shepherd. And love it...female priest...double love it...she is married!"

The Church of the Good Shepherd does indeed have a female rector, Cathy Dempsy-Sims. And she is indeed married, to a woman named Lucinda Dempsey-Sims, known as "Pete" to her friends.

The Reporter article didn't criticize Grandinetti's flip-flopping on faith, it questioned the timing of her announcement. According to her most recent post, the councilwoman joined the Church of the Good Shepherd last spring, just as the race for City Council was heating up.

If she felt so strongly about it, and there's all indications that she does feel strongly about it, why didn't she make her public announcement then, we wondered. Why wait until after the election to write the following:

"I left the Catholic Church because they do not respect women...do not support same sex families...and do not believe in pre marital (sic) sex...since I am not married it's the only kind available," she wrote. "I did not want to leave church on Sunday feeling bad."

In Facebook parlance, Grandinetti's post represents oversharing to the nth degree. To each his or her own, however, and if she wants to be an Episcopalian instead of a Catholic, God bless her.

But was it fundamentally dishonest of her to wait until after the election, months after she made her choice, to announce it publicly?

Would she have gotten the votes of the aging and conservative Italian, Polish and Irish voters who make up a large percentage of those who went to the polls on Election Day had those voters known her views on premarital sex, same sex marriage and families?

Quite obviously, she didn't want to find out.

Grandinetti is a public figure, a politician who has chosen to speak out on her personal views in the public forum that is Facebook.

It's just too bad she chose to conceal those views from the voters she apparently didn't trust to be as open minded as she is.

 

 

Niagara Falls Reporter - Publisher Frank Parlato Jr. www.niagarafallsreporter.com

Nov 26, 2013