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Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
June is Pride Month and this weekend Portland will hold its annual Pride festival. Bangor’s festivities are next weekend.
As has sadly become typical, while LGBTQ+ Mainers and their allies celebrate their many hard-fought successes, there are groups — often professing Christian faith — demeaning and questioning the existence of Pride Month.
In a recent lengthy email, Thomas Keith, a policy analyst for the Christian Civic League of Maine, called Pride a selfish holiday and “a degradation.”
I know I shouldn’t give attention to such perverted and inflammatory views, but this perspective has Pride backward.
“It’s a degradation,” Keith writes about Pride Month. “Indeed, it’s a forgetting: Only if we had forgotten what holidays are for could we have decided to give the LGBTQ+ community their ‘special day.’ In this kind of holiday a particular person or group, rather than fading into the background, asserts themselves forward.”
Here’s the thing: Keith clearly gave voice to the motives of a small, but vocal, group of people who want us to forget about our LGBTQ+ friends, neighbors and family members.
They want them to fade into the background. In some cases, they want LGBTQ+ Americans, especially those who are transgender, to be erased, as if they don’t exist and deserve our love and support.
Keith also blames those who are LGBTQ+ for causing division. This is also backward. Inclusion is not divisive. Rather, telling a group of people that they are other, that they have fewer rights and that they should fade into the background is not only divisive but hateful.
As for Keith’s suggestion that Christians should mark Pride Month by forgetting about it, ignoring the hundreds of efforts to diminish and marginalize LGBTQ+ Americans is just what the backers of these efforts want. They want us to turn our attention elsewhere as they work to pass laws and file court cases to deny LGBTQ+ people the same rights that other Americans have. The right to love who they want. The right to marry who they love. The right to be free from the fear of losing a job, housing, or their children. The right to be who they are.
Nationally, there are hundreds of efforts to roll back basic rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, especially those who are transgender. In Maine this month, Regional School Unit 40, in the midcoast, eliminated a policy meant to support transgender students. The district’s school board voted to end the policy even though most speakers at public meetings and the superintendent supported keeping it.
Many of these efforts — from school board members to governors and members of Congress — literally seek to erase LGBTQ+ people from our history and our present, as if they don’t exist or don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else. Supreme Court justices have suggested that some of these rights should be reconsidered, even eliminated.
That, to me, seems pretty divisive. Blaming LGBTQ+ Mainers who want to be treated the same as everyone else for causing division seems pretty odd for a religion that teaches its followers to be accepting and supportive of everyone and warns of the dangers of judging others.
This Pride Month, and every day, LGBTQ+ Mainers and their allies should not be pushed to the sidelines or told to fade into the background. Instead, it is a time for a recommitment to the ongoing work of fostering diversity and inclusion while pushing back against efforts to diminish and erase our LGBTQ+ colleagues, friends and family.