A pride organization has rejected an application for a float from a group of gay Trump supporters.
Brian Talbert is a member of Deplorable Pride, a group of gay people who support Donald Trump. The name is a reference to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” a phrase she used to describe white supremacists and the alt-right.
Talbert wanted to have a float in the Charlotte, North Carolina, pride parade. So he sent an application to Charlotte Pride but was denied.
“For a group of people to claim to want tolerance, acceptance, and give it to every single person you can imagine to give it to, for them to sit back and judge me for exercising my right as an American to choose my leader without judgment is hypocritical,” Talbert told Fox 46.
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Er… there is no right to “choose my leader without judgment.” In fact, that directly contradicts the First Amendment, which gives us all the right to judge other people’s political decisions.
Which is what Charlotte Pride said they did: “Charlotte Pride reserves the right to decline participation at our events to groups or organizations which do not reflect the mission, vision and values of our organization, as is acknowledged in our parade rules and regulations by all groups at the time of their parade application. In the past, we have made similar decisions to decline participation from other organizations espousing anti-LGBTQ religious or public policy stances.”
“I want them to realize that they’re doing the exact same thing they say bigoted people are doing to them — they’re the oppressors now,” Talbert told the Washington Post.
Oh boo hoo. Trump’s entire political message was about increasing oppression, and that didn’t bother Talbert enough to not vote for him. You can’t take a firm stand in favor of oppression and then whine when you feel oppressed.
And this isn’t even oppression. Pride is a political message, and if it allowed every float imaginable in the parade then it wouldn’t be able to convey its message.
It’s hard to deny that Donald Trump has some serious anti-LGBTQ positions. He rescinded guidelines that barred discrimination against transgender students, he nominated a plethora of homophobes to powerful positions, he is speaking at a convention that’s a veritable “who’s who” of anti-LGBTQ extremists, and he refused to even recognize June as Pride Month.
And that’s not getting into Trump’s misogyny and racism, which are important since pride is for women and people of color, too.
Talbert says he’s planning a lawsuit and told Fox 46 that he has already raised $4000 online for it.
The lawsuit won’t get that far considering that the question of “do parades have a right to exclude groups” has already been decided by the Supreme Court, in the context of gay rights, and Talbert’s side won!
And here I thought that conservatives didn’t like it when the government told private organizations who they had to associate with….
This group chose to name itself “deplorable,” a word that literally means “bad” but has figuratively come to mean “white supremacist.” Charlotte Pride was right to keep them out of the parade.
Trump supporters enraged because pride org won’t let them in parade