This June, some Republican-led states are rebranding Pride Month with staid-sounding faux-morality.
Instead of celebrating the rights and dignity of its LGBTQ+ communities, Utah and Arkansas are choosing to label this month “Fidelity Month.” They may as well come out and say queer people are “infidels.”
Tennessee and Alabama Republicans — supporters of President Donald Trump, a father of five children from three different marriages — have dubbed June as “nuclear family month.”
Alabama’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, wants the month of June to be known as “Strong Families Month.” Ivey, who is also a strong Trump ally, has been married and divorced twice and has no children.
The hypocrisy is off the charts. And it’s dangerous.
For much of human history, Western civilizations have sought to shame and criminalize gender and sexual diversity. For LGBTQ+ communities, recent GOP-led political attacks and cultural erasure are matters of life-and-death. Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people have surged. Debating the rights of queer people to exist has fueled suicide within that community.
Pride has been an antidote to the outdated taboos and dangerous stigmas that have hurt innumerable people. The history of Pride month goes back to the first Pride March in New York City on June 28, 1970 commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
Today most major cities in the U.S., along with many smaller towns, mark Pride Month with marches and parades throughout June. They are joyful occasions celebrating marriage equality, bodily autonomy, gender affirming care, and the freedom of people to be themselves without fear or judgement.
Although not without flaws, Pride has aspired to be a life-affirming tradition, even spreading all over the world. The rainbow Pride flag encourages people to break out of heterodoxy and binary thinking — puns definitely intended.
The Republican attacks on LGBTQ+ people serve a similar purpose to their racist attacks on immigrants. Both groups are vulnerable communities, scapegoated to distract people from their own economic hardships.
As the United States mints the world’s very first trillionaire, Elon Musk, about half the nation — which amounts to hundreds of millions of Americans — is struggling to get by. The prices of oil, groceries, and commercial flights remain high as a result of Trump’s war on Iran. Skyrocketing health insurance costs are crushing Americans. Higher education has become out of reach for a majority of people. Childcare costs are ridiculous. And housing costs continue to soar.
The rebranding of Pride Month not only feeds the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ communities but obscures the very real economic injustices facing most Americans.
It’s rich for Republicans to uphold so-called family values in an economy that is hardly suitable for building and raising families of any sort. How can people consider having children when it might force them to choose between paying for childcare versus rent?
While conservative politicians are busy erasing queer families, they are enriching the already rich while shrugging off the struggles of working Americans. Notably, the GOP is happy to be the near-exclusive recipient of political contributions from Musk’s Super PAC.
Pride can and should go hand-in-hand with economic justice for all. Transgender youth are almost 10 times more likely to be unhoused than the general population. LGBTQ+ workers earn lower wages on average than their straight cisgender counterparts.
The freedoms to live and thrive in a safe environment, to be educated and healthy without falling into debt, and to simply be able to put food on the table are all consistent with the freedom to marry or not, to procreate or not, to affirm one’s gender, and to love anyone one chooses.
The conservative answer to inequality is to worsen it through division and scapegoating. Our response must be grounded in collective liberation.
