Equality March: Separate Realities

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CNN reports:

Conservative gay Americans, for their part, view the march as a partisan event emphasizing “division far more than equality,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBT group.

“For months now we’ve heard that Trump is going to ‘roll back’ advances made by the LGBT community, and time and again those rumors were proven to be unfounded,” he told CNN. “All of this chicken-littling has turned the self-styled ‘Resistance’ into little more than a hollow cliche.”

Gay rights activists, however, say Trump’s refusal to issue an official White House statement commemorating LGBT Pride Month — chosen by advocates to commemorate New York’s Stonewall uprising in 1969 — is symptomatic of the White House’s agenda for LGBT Americans. The march on Sunday will be an attempt to the let the Trump administration know that America’s LGBT community will not be ignored, they say.

Along similar lines:


Scott Shackford offers a reasoned assessment:

But Trump has notably not espoused antigay policy stances and has, in fact, resisted efforts to do so within his administration. So far, Trump is probably the most LGBT-friendly Republican president we’ve had.

That doesn’t mean that Trump supports the same policies that progressive LGBT leaders would like. That’s really the crux of the problem: Trump’s administration doesn’t want to use the federal government to advance anti-discrimination policies that cover LGBT people. His Department of Justice has withdrawn federal guidance ordering public schools to accommodate transgender students’ gender choices for bathrooms and other facilities.

Put in historical context, that’s a relatively mild decision, though it must feel awful for transgender students who are affected (and ultimately it may be decided by the courts, not Trump’s administration, anyway). Despite LGBT activists’ fears, the administration is not scaling back executive orders forbidding government contractors from engaging in LGBT discrimination. Life is still improving for LGBT people.

More.


Given the proximity of “Remember Pulse” and “F*ck Trump” signs at the Equality March, it’s as if Donald Trump, rather than homophobic jihadi Isalmism, was behind the Pulse nightclub massacre whose anniversary the March was helping to mark.

Added. The world as the LGBT left sees it: Via a commentary in The Advocate:

Trump quickly seized on the Pulse shooting in an attempt to further isolate Muslims and LGBTQ people from one another. … But the LGBTQ community never took the bait. Instead of broadbrush blaming of an entire religion for the act of one crazed individual, it locked arms with American Muslims in an incredible sign of unity.”

One crazed individual!

James Kirchick addresses this sort of response (in discussing Linda Sarsour’s Politics of Hate and the Pathos of Her Jewish Enablers) when he writes:

One sees this mentality at play in the ADL’s skirting the question of Islam entirely in its poll on European anti-Semitism, in the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that the people murdered at a Paris kosher supermarket by an avowed Islamist in 2015 were victims of a “random” assault on “a bunch of folks in a deli….”

More. Social conservatives are none too pleased.

11 Comments for “Equality March: Separate Realities”

  1. posted by JohnInCA on

    That “conservative gays” view the event as partisan and think it’s unnecessary would be a lot more persuasive if they hadn’t been sticking to the same line for decades.

    • posted by TJ 3rd on

      I think East and West Coast folk do things differently. At Twin Cities, the gay Democrats and Republicans have booths, but the Pot Party, er…”Grassroots Party”, sometimes gets motivated enough to participate. Where as the Democrats and Republicans might be giving out free balloons, the grassroots party has better gifts. Sometimes a Socialist party gets a table , but they usually just have copies of their newsletter or outdated brochures. the libertarian table is generally not much better.

  2. posted by Kosh III on

    last week Trumpf and Pence both spoke at a meeting of the hate group led by Ralph Reed.

    He has appointed Cabinet officials and others who are leaders of the gay-bashers.

    I will believe he’s gay friendly when he pushed and gets legal protections barring discrimination.
    The right yammers about religious freedom but not one word about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for gays–just the opposite.
    Frak them all. I suspect some are posting this garbage as an audition for a job with the fourth reich.

  3. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    More. Social conservatives are none too pleased.

    Nor, apparently, are Trumpian homocons (although we knew that already from IGF).

    I guess that Pride demonstrates (yet again) the old adage — “You can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.”

    In this case, the people not pleased are conservatives of all stripes. No surprise. Happens every year when June comes around.

    • posted by Jorge on

      Nor, apparently, are Trumpian homocons (although we knew that already from IGF).

      *Rolls eyes.* “National Freedom Hero” controversy this is not.

      Wait, actually, it might well be… in reverse.
      (Now, dear, that was uncalled for.)

  4. posted by TJ III on

    1. President Trump has many opportunities to demonstrate what sort of policies he supports and does not support. He has plenty of resources to articulate his message and policy ideas in this (or any other issue). Trying to pretend otherwise, is just silly. What has he done bad? Thus far, he appoints hardcore socially conservative, anti-gay people to important positions in his government, expresses a desire to pack the court with more Justice Scalia-type justices. During the Presidential campaign, he flip flopped on whether or not gay people — to say nothing of transgender people — should have civil rights protections. What has he done good? Well, he has not — apparently — banned gay pride events from happening within a Federal department/agency. He has not formally rolled back the Clinton era civil rights protections (for civil service/federal employment), although its anyone’s guess if the protections will be enforced.

    2. If you have to ask whether or not their are LGBT groups have opposed anti-gay violence (justified by religion or politics or gender roles or what-have-you), then you are a troll or a fool. While not every LGBT rights group focuses on gay rights outside of their nation (or state or town), quite a few LGBT groups have — for decades — done research and condemned LGBT violence and discrimination (be it from religious or secular-based governments or vigilante groups, etc). Most of these groups would probably be called “progressive”. Certainly, some of the first (two?) people to report on/condemn the anti-gay violence in Iraq were progressive people. These NGOs have had some success getting LGBT rights introduced into international policy and development discussions.

    3. As I said before, with some homocons, the numbers do not add up. Yet, they keep insisting that it doesn’t matter that they failed mathematics.

  5. posted by Jorge on

    The world as the LGBT left sees it: Via a commentary in The Advocate…

    Would it be too cliche to point out that most of the people murdered by Islamic terrorism are other Muslims?

    Because I think the author completely missed the forest for the trees. The problem Donald Trump pointed out is not “Muslims”. The problem is that some people are evil. The United States has an unmet responsibility to protect its people from evil people. Those are two things a lot of progressives seem to be blind to unless it involves some kind of discrimination.

    The right yammers about religious freedom but not one word about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for gays–just the opposite.

    That was an amateurish overreach, but I’ll let it slide this time.

    Social conservatives are none too pleased.

    If only Jerry Falwell hadn’t been off watching Teletubbies, the culture war might have ended differently.

    “Social conservatives were hoping such official LGBT gatherings would be scaled back in favor of more talk about combat readiness, not constant social change within the ranks.”

    You lost that one once Sen. Kirstin Gilibrand (already a thorn in the military establishment’s side) started throwing around the f-bomb. The four-letter one.

    By the way, if I proposed cutting off funding for “special interest events” at my job, I’d be run out of the office. And not by the gays. What a lot of BS.

    • posted by Kosh III on

      Overreach? Hardly.
      “Got Aids Yet?
      “AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality”
      “Kill a queer for Christ”
      Homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered”
      Not to mention all the gay-bashing laws that have been passed and promoted for many years.
      Maybe if you dared to step out of your enclave of blue safety and lived a few years in places that embrace the same regressive beliefs; try Sylacauga AL or Pine Knot KY….

      • posted by Jorge on

        I intend to let you wallow in your blind ignorance for quite a while longer.

  6. posted by TJ 3rd on

    If you don’t like how a pride parade is run, you can get involved in the planning stages or do your own parade.

    I’d have more sympathy for people who made an effort to volunteer, help with the boring,but necessary details, etc and could not get their “Gays For Santorum ” booth.

    • posted by Lori Heine on

      In what alternative universe do you imagine “progressives” would permit anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep with them about absolutely frigging everything to “get involved with the planning stages” of Pride?

      You are delusional.

      The Left is going to keep eating its own, until there’s nothing left but sick little weaklings who crave validation the way a junkie craves heroin.

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