Pride celebrations used to be uniting, inclusive, and even family-friendly affairs that celebrated the dignity, equality, and visibility of LGBT people.
Not anymore. Today, Pride has been hijacked by a radical Leftist subset of the community that has no interest in including Americans with different political views or building bridges with the rest of the country. The Pride flag, once a unifying and shared rallying cry, has turned into a symbol for a uniquely liberal agenda that doesn’t welcome conservatives, gay or otherwise, and projects hostility at the majority of Americans’ views from schools to sports.
But, just as President Trump’s election last year ushered in a return to normalcy and mainstream commonsense, so may Pride soon go through a similar recalibrating. For LGBT conservatives, the return to sanity in Pride can’t come soon enough.
Americans with conservative values, regardless of their sexuality, are not particularly welcome at Pride. It’s no longer about supporting LGBT equality, but about “intersectionality,” which means endorsing a vocally Left, anti-Trump agenda on issues that go far beyond gay rights, like “Queers for Palestine” or anti-ICE protests. The organizers of Pride have made that clear. Just look at some of the themes of this year’s Pride celebrations and you’ll notice a common theme. In San Francisco, the theme is “Queer Joy is Resistance.” In New York, it’s “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.”
The message is clear: if you don’t think we need to “protest” or “resist” the Trump administration, then Pride is not for you. Organizers sometimes even try to enforce this literally. Earlier this year, a local Log Cabin chapter for LGBT Republicans in Smyrna, GA, was initially prohibited from participating in Pride, despite the fact that Planned Parenthood, a vocally Leftist organization, was granted similar access. (It took legal action and support from the Georgia Republican Party to finally get the local organizers to change course.)
Even the Pride flag itself hasn’t been immune. The universal rainbow flag, recognizable for generations, has been replaced with the “Progress” flag, which has been repeatedly redesigned in just the past few years with so many new symbols and colors of other causes that it’s become nearly unrecognizable.
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This overt politicization of the LGBT community hasn’t come without consequences. According to a poll released last year, the public’s support for LGBT rights declined for the first time in nearly a decade, no doubt a reaction to the increasingly partisan and insane division that activists are trying to sow.
Fortunately, people are starting to wake up to this explicit and unfortunate politicization of Pride and the LGBT community at large. For the first time in years, U.S. corporations are backing down from their past sponsorship funding of Pride events. Per the New York Times, about 25% of the usual corporate sponsors have declined to participate in Pride this year, hitting various Pride organizations’ budgets hard, some to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Left is quick to pin the blame on President Trump for creating a “backlash.” In reality, corporate America is finally recognizing what the rest of us have understood for a while: Pride is no longer about supporting the LGBT community. It’s an ideological, identity-politics-driven political rally. Supporting the LGBT community does not require endorsing the radical laundry list of views that, while unpopular and fringe just a few years ago, are now considered by activists as unnegotiable red lines. Instead of wading into the Left’s unpopular and divisive political wars on issues like parental rights and women’s sports, corporations are opting to stay out of it.
Could President Trump’s election and the retreat of corporate America be what we need to make Pride sane again? Or will Pride organizers respond to this corporate retreat by entrenching themselves even deeper into their radicalism? Pride can still be a unifying and positive force for the LGBT community. But until its organizers stop defining the events with radical issues and partisan tones, a significant number of Americans will get the message loud and clear that they’re not welcome.