Our response to the Gambit article titled: New Orleans swingers story exposes LaToya Cantrell’s desire to have it both ways

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Our response to the Gambit article titled: New Orleans swingers story exposes LaToya Cantrell’s desire to have it both ways

In a word: wrong.

In three: disrespectful, gross, and inaccurate.

Let’s glide over the basic fact-checking and lack of copy editing and deal with the substance of Mr. Stanton’s column.

When Sean Feucht and his make-me-a-martyr sideshow came to town, the NOPD and the Cantrell administration did not give them the fight they were looking for. The NOPD’s first and highest priority is public safety--- so given the size of the crowd, they acted to de-escalate and to divert traffic. De-escalation is what they are trained for. It’s why during the whole monuments saga no one so much as got bashed in the head, while huge mobs of angry and volatile crowds on both sides had the space to exercise their rights.

That’s not what the “Let Us Worship” event was about, and pretending otherwise starts off this opinion piece in bad faith--- to pick a phrase. It gets worse from there.

Had the NOPD gone in swinging and dragging people away from praise songs in handcuffs, certainly a segment of Mr. Stanton’s readership would have cheered. The same segment that is constantly apoplectic about police action of any kind --- and it would have been just as hypocritical and damaging as goading the City into a feel-good fight with people who don’t pass an imaginary litmus test for what’s okay to protest about and what’s not.

The “Trump Prayer Rally” in the Channel was a literal non-event. It’s included here in an embarrassingly bad effort to hit the fabled “one-two-trend” count that hacks use to frame pieces like this.

And the swingers convention was … not permitted by the City. Or the state. That’s not how the law works. And as much fun as Gambit writers and reporters had with the headlines (more on that in a moment), it wasn’t illegal. Stupid and unsafe, certainly --- and the consequences for that were the 41 positive cases that emerged.

Picture Mr. Stanton, or any other journalist in the City, writing this column under that headline about Mitch Landrieu. Or any of his sixty predecessors.

This kind of unexamined misogyny is appalling in any circumstance, but coming from newly-local journalists who purport to be the conscience of the City --- it is utterly unacceptable.

This City twice stopped the spread and bent the curve because of hard choices this Mayor made. Diminishing that for a cheap laugh and a facile argument does your readers, and our residents, a terrible disservice.
*And incidentally --- the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation doesn’t exist anymore. Google is right there, John. You can even find some posts from the publication you work for that covered it.

- Action New Orleans
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