There’s no place like home, especially if it’s Kansas

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Almost every time I read a piece of news Pam Spaulding has dug up, my mouth, as the song goes, drops open like a country pond. Posting at Pandagon, Pam tells about a 12-year-old Kansas boy who visited the Oz Museum and bought a souvenir, a rainbow-colored flag. “Over the Rainbow” is, of course, from the film, The Wizard of Oz. Judy Garland is said to have once remarked to a woman in a nightclub ladies’ room, “Lady, I’ve got rainbows up my ass,” a sentiment that is being felt in Meade, Kansas right now, for all the wrong reasons.

The boy’s father, J.R. Knight, who owns the Lakeway Hotel, a bed and breakfast, in Meade, hung the flag on the outside his b&b, next to the American flag. Everything went fine until the local newspaper reported that a gay flag was hanging outside the Lakeway.

The first problem with this tale is that the local people did not know that there was such a thing as a rainbow flag until they read about it in the newspaper. So much for diversity education. But once they found out about it, they got busy running their mouths off, and how.

It turns out that the newspaper reporter didn’t bother to call Knight and ask him about the flag. So much for journalism. The local radio station called him, though, to tell him it was removing the hotel restaurant’s commercial spots if the flag didn’t come down. A local pastor told him that what he had done was equivalent to hanging a pair of women’s panties on a flag pole, which just goes to show you, these people are thinking about sex a lot. Another man said: “To me it’s just like running up a Nazi flag in a Jewish neighborhood. I can’t walk into that establishment with that flag flying because to me that’s saying that I support what the flag stands for and I don’t.” Right–because we all know there are no gay or bisexual people or people who support them in Kansas. And certainly not in Meade.

Knight says that he is glad for the flag to be seen as a gay pride symbol or anything else.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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