PRIDE 2023 DEFIES WHITE SUPREMACISTS, CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS
Teaching Queer Kids at Writing Camp, I Learned You Can’t Prohibit Pride
Or Being Queer
Some prohibitions I’m down with because they’re truly dangerous — like banning smoking from public facilities. I breathed in second-hand smoke for the first 20 years of my life from multiple family sources, and then off and on for the next 35 years whenever I’d visit family or walk into the faculty lounge at my teaching institution. But even anti-smokers like me know that total bans don’t work, even if they’re put in place to promote better health.
Because it’s even more dangerous and more immediate, I would support a total ban on assault-style weapons, though I know that even with such a ban, people who wanted them badly enough would find ways to purchase them from clandestine entities. For when these people and their apologists declare that America is “One Nation Under God,” what they mean is that we’re “One Nation Under Guns.”
These dangerous health concerns worry me, but what in this June Pride Month moment worries me more are all the attempts to ban something that poses no danger to anyone’s health: the idea and reality of being queer. That fear-mongers in our political/religious world try to stigmatize queer people as…
