A State Senate candidate’s imaginative past has caught up with her after comments she reportedly made claiming Harry Potter was luring children into witchcraft resurfaced.
Republican Sandi Martinez, who is in her fourth campaign for the Senate, also apparently warned of the dangerous influence of cartoons including The Care Bears and The Smurfs.
The Care Bears could destigmatise the occult, Sandi Martinez has previously warned
Alternet cites a Boston Globe story from 2010:
“On her cable access show in 2004, Martinez warned that trick-or-treating, Harry Potter books, and the ‘new age images’ presented in 1980s-era programming such as ‘The Smurfs’ and ‘The Care Bears’ could destigmatise the occult and leave children vulnerable to the lure of witchcraft.”
“She said: ‘To me, that’s what the Harry Potter is doing, only in a much broader scale than the Smurfs ever did. The children are going to remember those feelings that they had watching the movies, reading the books, and they’re going to be prime targets’.”
Martinez also branded Halloween “blatantly part of the occult” and implied homosexuals have empty and meaningless lives, the Lowell Sun claimed.
The Tea Party activist is quoted as saying: “We’ve seen former homosexuals come out, who’ve been saved out of the lifestyle, who will tell you it was the love of God, that their lives were sad and empty and meaningless.”
Sandi Martinez is Republican candidate for State Senate in the Third Middlesex district, MA
Her campaign manager Tom Firth told the newspaper Martinez was referring to how people “turn to God to be saved” and that she “doesn’t have any anger towards homosexuals or cultists.”
The same episode apparently also saw Martinez imply LGBT people don't deserve civil rights, claiming: "They want to follow the same avenue of civil rights that many groups have done… The homosexual community has quite often used, 'we have our rights to do this, we have our rights to do that, and you're discriminating against us, etc.'"
Gay news site Towleroad claims Firth went as far as to deny the comments were ever made, accusing the Lowell Sun of "having an agenda" and that "to suggest otherwise is a clear distortion and biased reporting."
Martinez reportedly added: "I don't consider what you're doing reporting," before claiming she would review the tapes and contact the paper with further comments afterwards.
She never did though. Hmmmm.