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The Gay After Tomorrow

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Guest author Frank Bua is a Board Member of the Family Equality Council

 

It should come as no surprise that the Supreme Court has yet to issue rulings on two critical gay rights cases, Hollingsworth v. Perry and U.S. v. Windsor. According to the bible for Supreme Court junkies, SCOTUS Blog, landmark decisions require greater deliberation and tend to come out during the final day(s) of the court’s session — which this year is “penciled in” as June 24. Make no mistake: Gay D-Day is coming soon to a theater near you, its release inexorably and poetically linked with New York City’s Pride celebrations. When the decisions come down, any progress will likely be tempered with disappointment that more sweeping change didn’t take place. And this shouldn’t surprise anyone either.

For the LGBT community and our allies, the past month has been a whirlwind of success and setback; we may not have always enjoyed the ride, but we’ve certainly had a front seat on the roller coaster. The Boy Scouts allowed gay boys to join but will still kick them out when they turn 18. Immigration reform is making its most successful revival since 1986, but the Uniting American Families Amendment (UAFA) was rather ceremoniously excluded from the Gang of Eight’s bill and the Senate Judicial Committee’s markup. The Land of 10,000 Lakes completed the most stunning same-sex turnaround since Ken Mehlman came out, yet the Land of Lincoln failed to get the Democratic-controlled Illinois House to even vote on a marriage measure. Hate crimes and HIV are back to levels that we haven’t seen since the 1980s. And that’s to say nothing of harmful international revelations of the obvious: The Vatican has a gay lobby, and Russian freedom is taking a page from the Soviet playbook.

There are always roadblocks to change, and President Obama understands this better than most. The most memorable line of his second inaugural address, “from Seneca Falls, to Selma, to Stonewall,” was more than a pretty alliteration, or historic recognition of the LGBT movement in a broader civil rights context: It demonstrated his understanding of time as an agent of change. The women’s suffrage and civil rights movements had a not-coincidental three-generation gestation period; the amount of time between Seneca Falls’ Declaration of Sentiments and the passage of the 19th Amendment was 72 years. Likewise, 69 years passed between the creation of the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Furgeson and the March to Selma, which placed an exclamation point on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In such cases, as the older generation dies off, it takes with it the oppositional ignorance that was too ingrained to accommodate. The intermediate generation develops relationships with people from the minority group and begins to question the premise for — and justification of — discriminatory behavior simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” The next generation comes of age with a different worldview and frankly can’t understand what the problem was to begin with. Stonewall was 43 years ago; we may have to pave some more roads (and dig some more graves) before we find ourselves at the end of the rainbow.

Chief Justice John Roberts may find people falling all over themselves to support our movement, but 38 states still do not allow gays and lesbians to marry — and our movement is about more than just marriage. We need to push for inclusion of the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) in immigration reform to protect same-sex binational couples (paging Sen. Chuck Schumer); demand that Congress pass the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to end workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identification; educate our youth that while HIV may be treatable, it is not curable; and move the Every Child Deserves a Family Act (ECDF) into law so that the 400,000 children in foster care can be placed in homes with loving — and yes, even gay — parents. We need to give our youth the mechanisms to steer clear of hatred of others and themselves, and to take care of the LGBT elders who were on the front lines of our movement long before many of us were born. We need our president to issue his long-promised executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT workers, and we need to exercise the power of the purse by frequenting LGBT-friendly businesses, avoiding others (as if the Valdez spill wasn’t enough of a reason to avoid ExxonMobil) and supporting candidates (Christine Quinn for mayor of New York, Corey Booker for U.S. Senate) who speak to our issues.

I too am eager to find out the decisions in Hollingsworth v. Perry and U.S. v. Windsor, but our journey for equality will continue beyond these important cases. In the end, it is the court of public opinion that matters most — and the Williams Institute indicates we are doing pretty well there.

After all, it’s about time.

 

Image, top, by Dan Marchese

A version of this article originally appeared at The Huffington Post and is published here with the author’s permission.

skitched-20130616-133756Frank Bua is educator, writer and member of Family Equality Council‘s national Board. His short story, Lost and Found, can be found in the anthology West Hollywood Stories. He lives in Manhattan with his partner and their four-year-old twins.

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News

Trump Administration Hit With Lawsuit for Removing Pride Flag

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The Trump administration is facing a lawsuit accusing it of breaking federal law by taking down the LGBTQ+ Pride flag at New York City’s Stonewall National Monument, the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

The U.S. Department of the Interior and Secretary Doug Burgum, as well as the National Park Service and Acting Director Jessica Bowron, are named in the lawsuit filed by attorneys for the Gilbert Baker Foundation and others. Gilbert Baker is the artist who created the rainbow Pride flag.

“In the lawsuit,” The New York Times reported, “the Gilbert Baker Foundation argued that the original Pride flag fell under one of the allowed exceptions: to provide historical context at national monuments. This is the exception that allows Confederate flags to be flown at properties managed by the Park Service, including Gettysburg National Military Park.”

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“This was no careless mistake,” the lawsuit reads, according to a screenshot posted by New York Daily News reporter Molly Crane-Newman. “The government has not removed other historical flags at other national monuments, most notably Confederate flags.”

The suit alleges that the “assault on Stonewall is the latest example in a long line of efforts by the Trump Administration to target the LGBTQ+ community for discrimination and opprobrium.”

“In February 2025, for instance, the administration removed the word ‘transgender’ from prominent sections of the Stonewall monument’s website, as part of its wider campaign to demean and erase the transgender community,” it states.

“The Trump Administration has deleted numerous NPS websites discussing LGBTQ+ history,” it continues, “fired at least one federal employee for displaying a pride flag in his office; banned the use of pronouns in email signatures; renamed a John Lewis-class replenishment oiler named after Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay rights leader who served as a Navy officer and one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States.”

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It also cites what it calls “a particularly absurd example,” in which images of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay — the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb — were flagged for deletion, apparently because the images included the word “Gay.”

The lawsuit alleges a “pattern of systemic targeting of the LGBTQ+ community—combined with the starkly disparate treatment of the Pride flag,” which it claims “demonstrates that the decision to alter the Stonewall monument was not just a mistake. It was based on an impermissible animus.”

Numerous New York elected leaders at all levels, including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, denounced the administration’s removal of the flag.

The removal became a national flashpoint, drawing hundreds of locals to protest and prompting elected leaders to vow to raise it again.

Activists and officials gathered for multiple demonstrations at the Stonewall National Monument, where they raised a new Pride flag — an act that the Trump administration condemned as a “political stunt.”

READ MORE: Massie Warns of Growing GOP ‘Defections’

 

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Massie Warns of Growing GOP ‘Defections’

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A prominent House Republican who successfully advanced bipartisan legislation to release the Epstein files is predicting there will be more GOP “defections” once the primaries are over.

U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Politico that because Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority is so thin, “on any given day, I would just need one or two of my own co-conspirators to get something done” that goes against the Trump administration’s agenda.

He said that “what’s happening is that the retirement caucus is growing and primary days are coming up and passing. Once we get past March, April and May, which contain a large portion of their Republican primaries, I think you’re going to see more defections.”

Massie added that “quietly and privately, people are telling me they agree with me.”

In a surprising revelation, Massie said that House Republicans “are being told every week to stand down, bite their tongue, sit on their hands, do what they’re told, be part of the team and put their brain in neutral.”

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Massie also offered several other pointed remarks.

He noted that after President Trump called him a “moron” at the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, pastors were “not impressed and I don’t think anybody was impressed by his performance at the prayer breakfast. It was completely political.”

The Kentucky Republican further directed strong criticism toward Attorney General Pam Bondi after being the only member of his party to, as Politico reported, “spar” with her at last week’s contentious congressional hearing.

“When the attorney general is reduced to a stack of pre-prepared insults to deliver, and when the DOJ is responding to my every tweet with additional unredactions, I don’t think I’m going to change what I’m doing just yet,” he said.

Massie described Bondi as looking “weak and frustrated” at the hearing “when she started talking about the Dow Jones, which has literally nothing to do with her job.”

“I thought that looked bad,” he said. He also pointed to her “stack of insults that were pre-prepared — in politics you might call it oppo research — and you could see her shuffling through them to try and find which one matched the person who was trying to ask her a question at the time. She found my card like right at the end, as you can see she was looking for it.”

READ MORE: ‘Republicans Have to Lose’: Far Right Extremist Leader Puts Trump on Notice

 

Image via Reuters

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‘Republicans Have to Lose’: Far Right Extremist Leader Puts Trump on Notice

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Far-right extremist leader Nick Fuentes — who brands himself “America First” — once again is putting President Donald Trump and the GOP on notice, saying that Republicans are “gonna get destroyed” in the 2026 midterms and by 2028 it will be “Democrats on steroids.”

“We are headed for an utter and total defeat in the midterms,” Fuentes predicted on his Rumble streaming show on Monday, urging his supporters to not vote in November. Fuentes has 1.2 million followers on the X social media platform.

He said that “the Democrats will take the House, and then it is impeachment City. We are taking a trip to impeachment City.”

Democrats, Fuentes declared, will win the House and the Senate, and “then it’s impeachments, subpoenas, depositions, investigations. Trump might even be removed from office.”

“When all is said and done, he might even be pulled by his own people. That — there is a non-zero chance. As a matter of fact, there’s a good chance that’s gonna happen.”

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“Trump is getting impeached,” Fuentes continued. “Vance is getting impeached. Hegseth is — they’re all getting impeached. They’re all being subpoenaed. They’re all being deposed.”

“I warned you,” Fuentes said. “I told you, this is what was gonna happen.”

“My message in ’26, you could take it or leave it. Don’t vote. Don’t vote, do not vote in the midterms. The Republicans have to lose. They have to lose. They have to crash and burn. A cleansing fire is the only thing that will save us. It cannot be fixed.”

“F — — Trump, f — — MAGA, f — —  all this stuff. It can’t be fixed. If it could have been fixed, it would have been fixed in 2025, but it wasn’t.”

“They made every mistake. Liberation Day: disaster. DOGE: disaster. Big, beautiful bill: disaster. Epstein files: disaster. Iran: disaster.

“The personnel — Mike Waltz: disaster. Ratcliffe: disaster, Rubio: disaster. Pam Bondi: disaster — all self-inflicted. Trump personnel, Trump policy, Trump strategy, Trump playbook — we tried it your way, it didn’t work.”

“Now we don’t vote. That’s the message. Seriously. Can’t blame anybody else. Bad advice, bad advisors, Biden’s economy. Enough already. It didn’t work. We’re not voting. I’m staying home, and you know what? I hope the Democrats impeach him. I hope the Democrats impeach all of them. I hope they indict everybody. I hope they depose and compel the release of documents, and I hope they find all the criminal behavior, and I hope it destroys the GOP. I hope it creates a crisis for the GOP so severe that they never recover.”

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Fuentes predicted that “in two years, this is gonna be the most unpopular administration in history. It’s gonna be a repeat of 2020. That’s what we’re looking at here.”

“Think about where Trump is — lowest approval rating of any modern president. Trump’s approval is lower at this point in his presidency, lower than Biden at this point, lower than Trump was at this point. Lowest that it’s been in the second term.”

He also lamented the lack of results he and his “America First” followers wanted.

“He’s completely underwater with the under 40 crowd, and it’s only gonna get worse, especially because Trump is not delivering on these things. No mass deportations, economy’s not getting better. Housing prices have literally never been more unaffordable. The wars are escalating, actually, as opposed to getting better. And now, we seriously have to contend with the possibility that in 2028, we get Democrats on steroids. We get Democrats with a vengeance.”

Fuentes has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “white nationalist,” an “admirer of fascists,” and someone who “frequently relies on antisemitic tropes.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, “Fuentes has used his platforms to make numerous antisemitic, racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments,” and spreads “white supremacist propaganda.”

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