Monday, June 10, 2019

Take up the straight man's burden....




     I thought it was a joke.
     A meme, some online wit.
     That’s how news often enters our awareness. As flashes on the horizon, something crouching at the corner of our field of vision. A hoax from the Onion perhaps?
     On the fourth or fifth glimpse: fine, a “Straight Pride Parade,” ha-ha, let’s take a look.
     Oh.
     It’s real.
     Sorta.
     Just a permit. Not quite the Parade of Roses, yet. But the internet is nothing if not a hothouse for every cracked notion that manages to poke out of the earth, warmed by concentrated attention and nourished by the scattered like-minded.A group in Boston has applied for a permit to hold a Straight Pride parade on Aug. 31. To push back against Pride parades and Pride Month, which seems a bigger deal this year, perhaps because of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
     Why a Straight Pride Parade? A slap at Gay Pride, at all the underlings and those who support them by suggesting oppressed groups still exist.
     “For them, everything is based upon identity and whether or not one is categorized as a victim or an oppressor,” Straight Pride organizer Mark Sahady wrote on Facebook. “If you get victim status, then you are entitled to celebrate yourself and expect those with oppressor status to defer to your feelings.”
     There is a fragment of truth here — Democrats are big on identity politics, and that is a two-edged sword. We can celebrate uniqueness so much we forget the need to come together about anything.
     The solution is to find commonalities that include everybody. Someone who sincerely felt the unifying impulse parodied by Straight Priders would put their energies into stopping Donald Trump from commandeering our nation’s Fourth of July celebration and turning it into a celebration of himself. The 4th of July is, or was, exactly the kind of event that most Americans could get behind.

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2 comments:

  1. This is one of those asinine & offensive things that if no one wrote about it or complained about it, a couple of dozen morons would show up & end up embarrassed at being there.

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  2. "Straight pride" is like "white pride." It's meaningless on its own terms; there has never been any serious effort to make anyone ashamed of being straight or white. It's just a backlash to movements by oppressed minorities to cast off their oppression and take pride in their identity.

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