Sunday’s Pride March went on in Manhattan as it has in prior years, despite the dark clouds of uncertainty hanging over this year’s celebration of love.
People danced in the streets and frolicked under the sea of rainbow flags and confetti and blaring music that filled the streets from the Village to Midtown with joy.
New York is the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement, which launched with the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Over the past 50 years, LGBTQ New Yorkers marched, protested, lobbied, and campaigned for rights they deserved and had been denied — to marry, to share benefits, to be recognized for who they are.
The Big Apple has always set trends nationally; when a cultural movement happens in New York, it usually expands across America in a number of years. So too has the movement toward shattering discrimination based on sexual orientation.
When LGBTQ New Yorkers won, so too did LGBTQ Americans. Only four years after New York enacted same-sex marriage into law, a very different US Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex couples to marry nationwide in the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.
In recent years, the Pride March seemed to evolve from a political protest to a carnival reveling in a community of citizens who had come so far in five decades in getting recognition and equality. Yet in recent months, the community has been facing one challenge after another.
The federal government has taken aim at transgender Americans, barring them from military service, depriving gender-affirming care to minors with parental consent, even refusing to provide passports to Americans based on the gender to which they identify.
The fate of same-sex marriage also hangs in some doubt. With the US Supreme Court having overturned Roe v. Wade and expanded executive power in its recent rulings, will the court revisit same-sex marriage and have that overturned as well?
New York and the LGBTQ community at large have come too far over the past half-century for such retrenchment to take place.
Any efforts by the federal government to take away civil rights from LGBTQ New Yorkers, or any New Yorkers for that matter, must be met with a united and swift resistance through political action from every New Yorker, regardless of their background.
Speaking out in defense of liberty and civil rights for all Americans, regardless of background, is the surest way to preserve both — silence only paves the way for their elimination.
New York has led the way in the cause of freedom before. We will do so again.
