Pride Month Approaches

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June is Pride Month, and various cities and locales are facing a new wave of politically correct deplatforming and exclusion protests.

In Washington, D.C., organizers of D.C.’s annual Capital Pride Parade and Festival were pressed by a group called No Justice No Pride to ban police officers and corporate sponsors from the annual pride parade and events. The organizers stood their ground.


In Toronto, organizers went the other way and banned LGBT police from participating in their pride events, capitulating to Black Lives Matter activists.


D.C.’s Capital Pride did remove a volunteer event producer for expressing views they deemed offensive. Bryan Pruitt had posted an article last year at the conservative blog RedState that said government decrees and legislation regarding transgender bathroom use sought “to implement a solution in search of a problem. The City of Charlotte passes an unnecessary law and the State Legislature provides an equally overreaching response.”

On that point, if not on others, I would agree, so I guess my volunteer services would also be unwelcome.


And the demands keep coming….

7 Comments for “Pride Month Approaches”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    With the regularity of a tired old clock, we have been able to count on a steady diet of complaints about Pride parades on IGF, going back over two decades now. Too much flamboyancy, too few clothes, mindless celebration, and on an on. This year will be no different, I am certain.

    I like to use the opportunity to go back and look at Pride posts from earlier years. Bruce Bawer’s July 1995 post has been a favorite of mine for many years, beginning:

    Another Sunday in June, another bonanza for the religious right. To the gentle whir of Christian Broadcasting Network cameras, gay people in cities across America hold their annual Mardi Gras. In the middle of Main Street, men frolic in Speedos. Bare-chested women wave their fists. Activist leaders give speeches praising their audience’s dedication, victimhood, and all-around fabulousness. Thousands dance from dusk till dawn. Then exhausted by having made such a strenuous contribution to the cause, the participants go their separate ways. And in the ensuing weeks and months, while they’re absorbed in their lives and careers, money from underpaid Iowa farmhands and dirt-poor Arkansas pensioners helps finance the conversion of raw parade footage into slick videotapes efficiently designed to prop up the misperceptions that undergird continued inequality.

    The post goes on to describe the political activism of conservative Christians, and encourage gays and lesbians to get off their collective ass and get to work in politics, concluding:

    The more of this kind of activism we can accomplish, the more we’ll deserve our annual party. Celebrations are great, you know, once you have won the war; our problem is that we’re still in the thick of battle – a battle that will be won only through a disciplined, determined effort to counter the Christian Coalition’s falsehoods with the truth about who we are. When that victory’s achieved, I’ll enjoy a gay-pride event as much as anybody.

    We’ve accomplished a lot since 1995. But victory hasn’t been achieved, and we remain, as Bawer pointed out about 1995, “still in the thick of battle – a battle that will be won only through a disciplined, determined effort”. Instead of getting your drawers in a knot about the Pride uproar de jour, consider getting into the fight.

  2. posted by Lori Heine on

    In Phoenix, the people who actually do the work in our city can’t afford to go to Pride. We have an event called Rainbows Festival–which is affordable. It generally flies under the political radar, which is fine, too.

    • posted by Jorge on

      Ah, Phoenix had a lovely Independence Day event when I went some years back (it was during McCain’s last re-election campaign). Fireworks, country music, and Hispanic families. It was well worth it.

      • posted by Lori Heine on

        We do parties right.

  3. posted by Jorge on

    I realize the police are racist and homophobic and transphobic, but it takes a rare breed of idiot to think they’re the problem.

    Oh, alas, boo woo, and waaaah! It’s so hard to be a right of center gay person in the US.

    Maybe I should go back to work and make lots of money. Then I can give to Republican candidates who will stop the socialists from taking my money and kicking me out of power.

    “Pride Month Approaches!” Oh, no! I must, must, must make a great LGBT-themed poster for work. Time’s running out.

  4. posted by JohnInCA on

    To be clear, is Mr. Miller arguing that this isn’t right, or that they don’t have the right?

    ’cause my rebuttal to one is not the same as my rebuttal to the other.

    That said… is Mr. Miller actually taking part in organizing either event? His comment suggests he’s just a heckler.

  5. posted by Rex on

    My pride day is July 4th. Let’s face it, gay pride day is an anachronism and time to just quietly fade away. It’s just political street theater for the left and if it ever had any value it is long past relevance or effectiveness. It’s now just a swamp of post-modern bickering and jockeying for victim hierarchy. Let it go, be proud of something you actually are responsible for accomplishing .

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