After George Floyd was killed while in police custody last year, far-left Pride organizations banned uniformed officers from participating in LGBT Pride marches in cities throughout America.
LGBT police were allowed to march in the Pride parades in New York and San Francisco, but they couldn’t wear their uniforms. The openly homosexual police chief of Aurora, Illinois, was well-known for boldly walking in her city’s yearly parade. Meanwhile, Seattle’s PrideFest instructed law enforcement to totally avoid its event grounds.
The argument that police should be excluded from Pride is based on the notion that police fear is inherent to same-sex desire and that the police do not have the interests of the LGBT community at heart.
But it seldom ever happens. One reason is that anti-gay hate crimes are uncommon in places like New York; according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice, there were just 57 reported anti-LGBT hate crimes in 2020, down from 107 in 2016, and when they do happen, victims frequently describe having very positive interactions with police.
Consider the 2015 Cinco de Mayo Dallas BBQ hate crime in New York City. The incident happened when a young gay guy knocked over a fellow customer’s drink as he was leaving the Manhattan Dallas BBQ restaurant.
After a disagreement, the other customer used an anti-gay slur and hit the victim in the head with a wooden chair. Bayna-Lekheim El-Amin, a native of the Bronx, was subsequently detained and shown to be homosexual.
Following altercations between cops and guests during a routine raid on an illegal homosexual bar in Greenwich Village in June 1969, Pride was founded. The Stonewall rebellion, which was over a week long and was called after the Stonewall Inn where the incident took place, is usually regarded as the catalyst for the current homosexual rights movement.
Many on the left now draw an easy analogy between Black Lives Matter and the homosexual community more than 50 years later. They’re attempting to redefine the homosexual movement as always being anti-cop in order to claim that Stonewall was solely about this.
But many true believers on the radical left aren’t giving up, which is causing tensions to grow between the Democratic leadership and its irrational base. Because of this, Pride has evolved into an annual rallying cry for the loudest, obnoxious base of the far-left progressive movement.
The newest target is police. The radical left cannot have police officers being humanized by their presence at Pride.
