Duane Coute, too, had recognized Ms. Gendreau for years. Like Ms. Harrington, he had requested to fulfill along with her after her feedback blew up, hoping to grasp. As a substitute, he stated, he felt extra bewildered after she described her views to him.
The affable common supervisor of the native Chevrolet dealership, Mr. Coute, 55, was not inclined towards politics or public disputes. However he had spent his life in Littleton and was among the many enterprise leaders who had labored laborious to remake the previous mill city, as soon as in decline, right into a bustling vacationer hub.
As fall turned to winter, and nonetheless the choose board didn’t clearly reject Ms. Gendreau’s feedback, he couldn’t bear to see the city’s popularity endure such injury, he stated, its cloth torn by the animosity on each side of the dispute.
A few of Mr. Coute’s conservative pals, and a few of his workers, cautioned him towards leaping into the fray. He jumped in anyway, rallying greater than 1,000 enterprise individuals, residents and frequent guests to the city to signal a letter he wrote with different enterprise leaders in November imploring the board to “step again from this hurtful path.”
“This isn’t who we’re,” the letter stated. “Littleton is a vibrant, broad and inclusive group.”
The rainbow flags that North Nation Satisfaction had handed out to companies downtown had been new, however the space’s popularity for tolerance was not. It had been a vacation spot for homosexual vacationers because the Nineteen Eighties, when the Highlands Inn in neighboring Bethlehem, N.H., started promoting itself as a “lesbian paradise” in homosexual newspapers across the nation.