LGBT pride month is upon us, which heralds the resumption of American companies tripping over each other to adorn their brands with rainbow flags and messages of support. It also means that pride festivals and parades will unfold across the country each weekend. In a growing number of cities, most notably New York and Denver, organizers of these celebrations have decided to go Full Woke and explicitly exclude the police from participating – including groups of LGBT officers. This nonsense has been welcomed among the hardcore fringe but is deeply alienating to approximately everyone else. Americans do not hate law enforcement and do not believe that officers should be denied the ability to engage in pride revelry because they wear a badge. We covered this controversy in mid-May when New York's pride apparatus announced its radical and exclusionary decision.
But as similar committees elsewhere have followed suit, a funny thing happened in the Big Apple: Facing blowback and criticism, rank-and-file members of NYC Pride voted to overrule its radical leadership and lift the ban on police. But radicals with power are nothing if not fanatically self-righteous and imperious, so the leaders rejected their own membership's decision and voted behind closed doors to keep their original, divisive, unpopular decision intact:
Rank-and-file members of the group that runs NYC’s Pride March voted to overturn the board’s decision to ban cops from marching. The board met in closed session and voted to ignore its membership, @johnleland reports. ?? https://t.co/fT9WmeUdR6 pic.twitter.com/2CTmolAIh4
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) May 30, 2021
Rest assured that the "rank and file members of the group that runs NYC's Pride March" are not a bunch of right-wingers. Yet the move to bar cops from celebrating their own LGBT pride was sufficiently off-putting and angering to enough people that even this decidedly left-leaning (if not left-wing) group voted to back away from this top-down overreach. Yet the board chose to raise a middle finger to the rest of the group, making clear that their sneering contempt extends well beyond the law enforcement community; it also applies to their own organization. More details of the strife, via The Times:
“This is the worst that I’ve ever seen it,” said Maria Colón, a longtime Heritage of Pride member and former board member. “We’re at a pivotal moment where we either come back, or people will look elsewhere.” For Heritage of Pride, which just two years ago staged the biggest march in its history, with five million spectators attending, it was a stunning turn. How did a celebration that delights millions of people create so much rancor and mistrust? ... The response [to the board's anti-police ban] was immediate and heated. “It’s flat-out discriminatory,” said Russell Murphy, who was a member for 20 years and on the board for many of them. “To ban an organization that has been instrumental in Pride since its inception is just wrong.” Cathy Marino-Thomas, a leading activist in the campaign for marriage equality, said she was ending her associate membership in Heritage of Pride, calling it “out of touch.” “Not that there’s no issue with the police,” she said. “I’m completely on the side of our various communities that have suffered abuse from the N.Y.P.D. But to not allow a group of our siblings to tell their coming-out story, we become our oppressors.”
...At the hastily called May 20 Zoom meeting, emotions flared on both sides. Some supporters of the ban broke down in tears, describing how the presence of uniformed officers at the march made them feel unsafe and unwelcome. Sally Fisher, a member, moved for a vote of no confidence in the board, which was tabled until after Pride month. Another member, Antonio Centeno Jr., moved for a vote to overturn the ban...After members voted to rescind the ban, the meeting broke up, with hard feelings all around. “Everyone was frustrated, on principle and on process,” said Hannah Simpson, an associate member who opposed the ban. The 13-member board then met — without Mr. Thomas, who did not attend — and overruled the vote, sending notice to members just before midnight. “My jaw hit the floor,” said Ms. Fisher, who had called for the vote of no confidence. Brian Downey, president of the gay officers group, said he felt “betrayed” by the ban, especially because the officers “put so much of themselves on the chopping block” by working to change practices and attitudes within their departments.
When you put people who thrive on division and fixate on oppression/victimhood hierarchies, this is what you get. It's toxic, and even something as wildly successful and theoretically unifying as pride can descend into angry recriminations and fury. Finally, courtesy of an outspoken gay critic of the anti-cop pride purges, I'll leave you with a must-read analysis of another poisonous form of woke ideology:
"This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal."https://t.co/VQfW2EOyqm
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 28, 2021
Read it all.
