First off, I apologize for the poor quality of the lead image, which I snapped quickly while stopped at a red light.

The large billboard atop the building on the northwest corner of Kensington and Bailey is usually plastered with advertising for cell phones or a plumbing concern, but I also remember a simpler time when that building hoisted a confusing “The skoolz are failing, the board and Rumore must go” billboard; a prior calling card for Buffalo developer cum Trump surrogate, Carl Paladino.

Paladino has reined in his billboard invective since filling his Fairmont Creamery building with discerning tenants, but he didn’t spare the predominantly African-American business district of Bailey Avenue for this election cycle. City records show that the building is owned by J-P Group LLC, one of Paladino’s many subsidiaries.

“Christians don’t vote for abortions” is where he landed. Just let that sink in and consider, if you dare, his thought process. Knowing how important the Christian faith has been historically to African Americans, he must have figured his best weapon was religious guilt, assuming his own Catholic brand of guilt would find a ready parallel? I dare not hazard further gueses. 

Let’s remember again that Paladino fathered a child that he kept secret from his wife for almost a decade, that he was in the habit of forwarding racist and pornographic emails to his buddies, not to mention so many of his other rather unorthodox ways of expressing his own putative religion by denouncing and demeaning any one he comes against. He’s literally the last person in town who should be giving anyone lessons about righteousness.

Is it fitting for a sitting school board member to use his real estate empire to wield propagandist messages on a community he finds himself at constant odds with? How many distasteful and offensive indiscretions will it take? When he dismissed Trump’s comments about grabbing women by their genitals as locker room banter that every normal man engages in, nearly 3,000 people signed an online petition calling for his ouster.

This billboard is disgusting and disingenuous. And I’m sure he was positively tickled to do it.