When I read that this week's topic is Pride Week, one thing immediately came to mind. I was surprised to read the definition as being something a lot more general than Gay Pride Parades. Pride Week -- it wouldn't surprise me if some cities extend the Gay Pride parade to an entire week. Down in New Orleans it sure seemed that way sometimes. In most major cities the Pride parades are one of the great highlights of the year, socially and culturally.
There are speakers, there are rallies, there are the parades themselves encompassing a wide variety of GBLT organizations including PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Pride for me is all about Gay Pride events, especially when it's a phrase like that, sounds like a holiday.
Gay Pride events began by commemmorating the Stonewall riots in 1969, when police attempted to shut down a drag bar and the patrons resisted. By 1978 when I first attended a Pride rally, it had grown to something a lot more colorful. Rallies and political speakers alternated with entertainers, many groups and clubs wore costumes or decorated floats, the parade was turning into the wonderful spectacle you can see in every major city to this day.
Gay Pride events are usually signaled with rainbow flags, lambda signals and lavender flyers. One of the things I began to realize about the Gay Pride Parade events at the very first one I attended was that it is one of the truest ways to erode prejudice in this country.
Today, in many cities, Pride events go on and the whole city gets out for it the way they do for St. Patrick's day or any ethnic holiday. The GBLT community has become almost mainstream. The traditions, gay history, the struggle for equality has come far enough that these events aren't just for those directly affected either. They are open to everyone, and they're fun.
There is still a long way to go for GBLT people to gain true equality though. Today's struggle is for the right to marry. For all those years, when I heard people run down the gay community one of the first things they'd say was "they're so promiscuous" and put gay people down for not marrying -- when they don't have a legal right to marry each other.
Catch-22, isn't that?
The parade is more than just fun. The parade is a reminder that in a free country, there is something wrong about the idea that the law can decide who could marry or not. Within a given church -- it's up to that church. Churches set a lot of rules for their members that people outside them aren't obliged to follow. If you aren't a strict Jew or Muslim, you can get bacon and eat it and enjoy it.
But a country that has freedom of religion should not impose religious definitions of marriage on everyone else. Churches are divided too, it's not just "religious people are against gay marriage and agnostics or atheists are for it." There are plenty of liberal Christian and other churches that perform gay marriages that carry as much religious and spiritual significance as any other church wedding, but are not honored by law.
This is vital when someone American marries someone who's not and wants to bring his or her spouse into the country, adopt their kids, form an American family. This is vital when someone's in the hospital and someone wants visits from their spouse or to give power of attorney to spouse. This is vital when insurance coverage is supposed to protect family, but some people's spouses aren't protected.
Legal marriage has a thousand implications in day to day life that have nothing to do with whether it got celebrated in a church and everything to do with legal rights regarding health decisions, property, wills, insurance and taxes.
I remember that before I saw that first Pride parade, when I was a little kid, more than half the states in the USA made marriage between a black and white couple illegal. "Interracial" marriage was horrifying to most of the adults. It's not that this marriage inequality is something new in the USA. It's more that these injustices are things that America needs to correct and change.
I hope this year that you'll get a chance to take in a Gay Pride event or parade. Have fun, bring the kids, it's a parade. Maybe there will come a time when that really is just history and a fun parade from a colorful community that's legally treated exactly like everyone else and no longer discriminated against.
INTEL CONTRIBUTOR
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