Civil War on the Left, Part 40: Too Much Pride?

Last weekend was the occasion for gay pride parades in many cities around the country. Insofar as gay pride is associated with contemporary liberalism and has enjoyed continuous political triumphs over the last decade or so (including the election last November of our first ever president who took office having public supported gay marriage—heh), you’d think such parades would be matters of celebration. And you’d be wrong. Because never underestimate the ability of the left to fall out against each other.

In Washington DC, the pride parade was disrupted by other identity politics leftists. Something called “No Justice, No Pride” objects to all this gay pride:

WASHINGTON, DC — DC’s queer and trans community is no longer willing to accept that Pride isn’t possible without support from deeply problematic corporate sponsors. Capital Pride has consistently demonstrated that it is more interested in accommodating the interests of Metropolitan police and of corporate sponsors than it is in supporting the very communities it supposedly represents.

Because of the current political climate and in response to years of being dismissed and ignored by Capital Pride, members of Washington, DC’s queer and trans community took direct action on Saturday, June 10, blocking the Capital Pride parade.

Similar to other protests at Pride events around the country, members of No Justice No Pride, an ad-hoc coalition of local organizers, brought the parade to halt, offering a different vision for what LGBTQ Pride looks like and demanding that the Capital Pride board bar the participation of institutions that harm LGBTQ2S communities, specifically naming metropolitan police as well as corporations who profit from pipelines and war.

Read the whole thing if you want get the full chuckle experience.

The DC gay pridesters apparently anticipated this and simply re-routed the parade in real time when the protesters showed up. The anti-pridesters apparently aren’t the equal (heh) of their cousins up in Toronto, as this report from James Kirchick last year makes clear:

On Sunday, Black Lives Matter activists pulled off the sort of victory that right-wing hooligans could only hope to achieve: They stopped a gay pride parade.

“We are calling you out!” Alexandria Williams, co-founder of the group’s Toronto chapter, shouted through a megaphone as the Black Lives Matter float came to a halt and marchers sat down. Amid rainbow-colored smoke bombs, she accused event organizers of harboring “a historical and current culture of anti-blackness” — a curious claim considering how the festival welcomed Black Lives Matter as “guests of honor.”

Black Lives Matter refused to budge unless pride organizers acquiesced to a list of demands, which included increased funding for black-related pride events, “prioritizing black trans women” in hiring, and “a commitment to more black deaf & hearing ASL interpreters.” Surely, these issues — which are always “demands,” never “requests” — could have been taken up in a constructive manner before the parade. But dialogue has never been the preferred mode of communication for Black Lives Matter, not even, apparently, in uber-polite Canada.

It took only 30 minutes for festival organizers to surrender to this bullying. . .

Live by the four-way intersectionality, die by the four-way intersectionality, since a crash is inevitable where there is no equivalent of a stop signal to leftist craziness.

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