Pride Day

[lagatta]

Disgusting. I'd be hard-pressed to stage an "anti-Pride" protest, but have gay and lesbian friends who'd love to.

[Croghan27]

The Pride board just voted on Friday: QuAIA is out.

I wonder if that action will have any influence on their federal funding - not this year, that is gone now - but in the future.
 
I see it is the term: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid that is banned, not the organization. I wonder if Israeli supporters will be allowed to participate with their colours flying?

[unionist]

It's not quite that either. It's far worse - they've banned the term "Israeli apartheid" from all events, according to the email quoted in the Globe article:

“the Pride committee has voted to ban the use of the term Israeli apartheid at all Pride-related events.”

We'll know for sure on Tuesday, when Pride Toronto is supposed to issue a statement. So if someone wears a T-shirt or carries a placard mentioning Israeli apartheid, they should expect to be confronted by Pride marshalls and (if that doesn't work) by police. This is disgusting, and you don't have to be queer to condemn it.

[Boom Boom]

Don't the police have other things to do?

[Alison]

then T-shirts emblazoned "Queers Against Apartheid" should be ok then :twisted:

[Croghan27]

I am not a member of the Toronto Pride organization, not by geography, inclination or orientation. Even if I have revelled in the joy that is engendered by the parade, it is not my business to tell the Queers of that city how to organize their endeavours.
 
But I am a citizen of Canada who has a profound distrust for the current government - it does not reflect my feelings and aspirations, and I wonder if this 'banning' is inspired by either the obvious opprobrium from the Federal government or comes from genuine feelings inside the organization.
 
If it is the latter all I can say is "Go for it". It is not my place to tell you how to run your functions. I may not agree with you, but there are many things that go on that I do not agree with. If it is the former then it is my business. If the government reaches out from the governmental sphere and directs an independent and private organization on how to operate, what to allow and what to ban (even if the sentiments banned are entirely legal - so far) I can only think of 'totalitarianism'. It is a shame that an occasion to get rid of an 'us and them' (is that not what the Pride Parade is supposed to be all about?) mind set has been turned into a 'your views are unacceptable' situation. The politics of exclusion is distasteful and demeaning to all involved.

[skdadl]

Well, the Pride board was divided (I read elsewhere that they voted 4-3), and the community itself is diverse, as they say. There are gays who are very uncomfortable with edgy politics of any kind except equality for gays -- you won't be surprised to learn that they tend to be rather better heeled than average. Success has made the Pride organization more conservative, more bourgeois anxiety-ridden, more eager to please the guys with the big bucks and political influence. It's an old story, oft repeated, alas.

I do think citizens have a legitimate pov on what's happening, on the grounds that it is our governments -- city and federal -- who've made scurvy decisions (or in the city's case, scurvy threats) about what will be allowed at Pride, and that's a threat to all of us.

[lagatta]

They are more well-heeled than average because a) Pride is dominated by gay men, not lesbians and certainly not transpeople and b) a certain kind of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois gay men. I know people involved in a radical queer action during our Divercité days, who are very pissed off at what the mainstream parade has become.

But we must also remember that the Harper government is PUNISHING any social, human rights or arts association showing any sympathies for the struggle of the Palestinian people. I have been affected by this directly as at least two of my main clients have endured punishing budget cuts and other sanctions. That is an issue for all people, whatever our sexual orientation.

[Croghan27]

snip
Success has made the Pride organization more conservative, more bourgeois anxiety-ridden, more eager to please the guys with the big bucks and political influence. It's an old story, oft repeated, alas.
 
I do think citizens have a legitimate pov on what's happening, on the grounds that it is our governments -- city and federal -- who've made scurvy decisions (or in the city's case, scurvy threats) about what will be allowed at Pride, and that's a threat to all of us.

I guess this means they have made it! They are well into the main stream of society with all its' bonuses and all its' drawbacks.
 
Will the Pride Parade and whole movement now descend into the importance of something like Victoria Day is to monarchists, or the March of King Billy on the Glorious 12th to Irish protestants: a weak symbol of something long past, but of little current import.
 
As for "But we must also remember that the Harper government is PUNISHING any social, human rights or arts association showing any sympathies for the struggle of the Palestinian people" it warms my heart not to know that the controlling impulses of the PMO are orientation blind.

[Boom Boom]

Speaking of Pride Day, I found this story outrageous:
 
New West church bucked policy by asking lesbian teen to leave Pride group
 


 
 

[deBeauxOs]

    Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
 
One positive element of the article was that the demonstration of support that young woman received from her parents.

[Toedancer]

GlennGreenwald's article is about the SF Gay Pride Parade and how Bradley Manning was ousted from it because Pentagon propaganda was more important to the capitalists who now run the parade.  But I was so outraged, so sickened by the times we live in that allows this, I wanted to post a portion of something else first. It doesn't explain ev., but it's a start.


You’ve heard of the “isolationist” right but I want to tell you about the “desolationist” left. -snip-

Desolationists believe it’s a big achievement that gay people have the same opportunity as straight people to slaughter innocent brown people on behalf of the American empire. Same way with “feminist” desolationists who celebrate women in combat roles in the military. One day these “feminists” will look back puzzled that the American government skipped right over Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, where women were segregated as sex slaves and breeding machines, and went directly to making America’s women war slaves while most of the menfolk will kick back on the home front drinking beer and watching sports. You go, girls! If we knew how to bake cookies, we‘d send them to you in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, wherever you‘re defending America’s values of aggressive war, resource theft, bolstering corrupt dictators and liquidating land reformers, union organizers and popular liberation movements. Capitalism will pervert everything eventually, including feminism. In fact, desolationists believe the delusion that feminism is stronger than capitalism.http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/19/the-desolationists/



Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embracedWilliams proclaimed that "Manning will not be a grand marshal in this year's San Francisco Pride celebration" and termed his selection "a mistake". She blamed it all on a "staff person" who prematurely made the announcement based on a preliminary vote, and she assures us all that the culprit "has been disciplined": disciplined. She then accuses Manning of "actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform": a substance-free falsehood originally spread by top US military officialswhich has since been decisively] and extensively]debunked[, even by some government officials(indeed, it's the US government itself, not Manning, that is guilty of "actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform"). And then, in my favorite part of her statement, Williams decreed to all organization members that "even the hint of support" for Manning's action - even the hint - "will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride". Will not be tolerated
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/27/bradley-manning-sf-gay-pride