Sometimes the irony is too thick to cut with your average kitchen knife.
I’ve frequently wondered why the various single issue groups that make up the coalition which is the Democratic Party don’t fall into internal squabbling more often. Many of them really don’t have much in common beyond a simple, gauzy label of “progressive” to begin with. The anti-gun rights groups, the pro-abortion contingent and the anti-trade people really don’t seem to share much common ground, and yet they frequently work together to elect Democrats to office who generally don’t do much for any of them beyond paying a bit of lip service. But this year there’s been a definite battle brewing between Black Lives Matter and the LGBT community. It came to a head during the final planning stages of the gay pride parade in San Francisco this week. It turns out that BLM was essentially going to boycott the festivities because there were going to be too darned many cops there. (The Guardian)
Several of the honorees of San Francisco Pride, the nation’s largest LGBT pride event, withdrew on Friday from the “racial and economic justice” themed parade and festival this weekend in response to the increased policing measures put in place after the Orlando attack.
“For us, celebrating Pride this year meant choosing between the threat of homophobic vigilante violence and the threat of police violence,” said a statement from Black Lives Matter, an organizational grand marshal; Janetta Johnson, a community grand marshal; and sex worker advocacy group St James Infirmary, a “Heritage of Pride” award recipient.
“We had a tough decision to make, and ultimately we chose to keep our people safe by not participating in any event that would leave our communities vulnerable to either.”
So after the shooting in Orlando, which many progressives are still claiming was about anti-gay bias rater than Islamic terrorism, there was going to be a significant police presence just in case some lunatic decided to try to shoot the place up. And Black Lives Matter responded by refusing to attend.
Let’s just say for a moment that there is a hotbed of cops in San Francisco waiting for the chance to shoot some black people. Do you really think they’d do it with camera crews from every network covering the parade from all angles, beginning to end? Not to mention tens of thousands of witnesses with cell phone cameras lining the route and recording the entire event. Sometimes there simply aren’t words…
But this isn’t the first flare-up we’ve seen between BLM and the gay community this year. At Mizzou, we already saw an LGBT support event disrupted when a protester showed up to complain about all the white people there. And it’s not limited to just the United States, either. In Toronto, Canada, the police had planned a nice ceremony to unveil a new mural dedicated to the LGBT community as a way of healing the wounds from a previous incident of violence between the police and gay residents. As you might have guessed, BLM broke that up too. (New York Daily News)
A group of Black Lives Matter activists barged into a Toronto police department ceremony, where cops unveiled a mural honoring the LGBT community as a public apology for a decades-old anti-gay raid.
The protesters, chanting “No pride in police,” said the cop’s gesture was nothing more than a publicity stunt “used to mask the reality of police relations amongst the queer and trans community, black people, indigenous people, sex workers et cetera,” local BLM co-founder Rodney Diverlus, 26, told the Toronto Star.
The mural was meant to celebrate the history of Toronto’s gay community and serve as a reckoning for the 1981 bathhouse raids, which has been called Canada’s Stonewall.
Nothing is ever good enough, it seems. But hey… as long as these groups want to keep fighting each other they’re welcome to do it. I suppose it’s better than spending their time fighting conservatives at the ballot box.
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