Happy Pride Month — and Please Don’t Add Any More Colors to the Rainbow Flag

 

Happy LGBT+ Pride Month to everyone who is observing!  The LGBT+ community has spent so much time forced into the shadows — I’m talking about decades and centuries — that I think it’s marvelous its members can now live openly and honestly without the awful stigma and disparagement once attached, at least in most of the Western world.  And I hope that all hate crimes against them will soon be completely and utterly relegated to the past.

As anyone who knows me can attest, I’ve spent a lot of time advocating for the greater inclusion of people of color (POC) in the media, and I’m a big fan of anything that can help raise their profile and those of other marginalized communities.  However, I’ve never grown to like adding colors to the now-familiar rainbow Pride Flag, with the six alternating primary and secondary colors.  While I think it’s important to recognize the contributions of further marginalized groups within the already marginalized LGBT+ community, I don’t think that adding extra colors to the Pride Flag is the way to go.  Why?  Because, very simply, it would mean — or be interpreted to mean — that LGBT+ people of color, and the others represented by the additional colors, were never a part of the original rainbow flag to begin with, that the rainbow flag never represented them.  Additional colors would mark the six-hued rainbow Pride Flag as exclusionary.

Still, I’ve kept my opinion on this matter to myself largely because (1) I’m not a part of the LGBT+ community and (2) an “official” Pride Flag has never been declared (and I understand that no one is in authority within the community to make any such declaration, which is as it should be).  I always figured that the LGBT+ community would resolved this issue on their own.

So, I was pleased to come across the above video by the YouTube user Shaaba, a member of the LGBT+ community and POC who also doesn’t believe that any additional colors should be attached to the six-striped rainbow flag.  She also discusses issues within the LGBT+ community which I, as an outsider, wouldn’t be able to articulate.  I’m glad that she agrees with me.  I hope that the other Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, and the additional letters that make up the community will listen to what she says.

Chris Hayes: ‘Why Has No Trump Ally Faced Consequences for Trying to Overturn an Election?’

Greg Sargent: ‘A frantic warning from 100 leading experts: Our democracy is in grave danger’

 From the Washington Post:

Democrats can’t say they weren’t warned.

With yet another GOP effort to restrict voting underway in Texas, President Biden is now calling on Congress to act in the face of the Republican “assault on democracy.” Importantly, Biden cast that attack as aimed at “Black and Brown Americans,” meriting federal legislation in response.

That is a welcome escalation. But it remains unclear whether 50 Senate Democrats will ever prove willing to reform or end the filibuster, and more to the point, whether Biden will put real muscle behind that cause. If not, such protections will never, ever pass.

Now, in a striking intervention, more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement of principles that seeks to make the stakes unambiguously, jarringly clear: On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself.

“Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars write in the statement, which I obtained before its release. “History will judge what we do at this moment.”

And these scholars underscore the crucial point: Our democracy’s long-term viability might depend on whether Democrats reform or kill the filibuster to pass sweeping voting rights protections.


Read the full article.