You can have a badge, or you can have a Pride flag. According to the radical wing of the LGBT activist class, you can’t have both. North American cities began banning uniformed officers from Pride marches around 2017, citing claims of psychic harm to people of color by the mere sight of police. The trend had dwindled to embers when George Floyd’s murder in the spring of 2020 poured gasoline all over it. Calls to ban police flared back up, just as “Defund/Abolish the Police” and “ACAB” (“all cops are bastards”) were becoming common slogans on the hard left. By 2021, cops were being banned in earnest, and in 2022, the trend has continued to spread across the US. But barring the police from participating in Pride is misguided pragmatically, politically, and most of all, philosophically.

From a purely logistical event planning perspective, the police help keep people safe at Pride. A large event of any kind requires security, all the more so for one involving a historically persecuted community. Indeed, there have been multiple cases where would-be mass killings have been thwarted by law enforcement, including one at LA Pride the day after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. Police apprehended a man on his way to the LA Pride march with a trunk full of guns and explosive-making materials.

Of course, the police sometimes fail at their jobs, as the painful example of the elementary school massacre at Uvalde, Texas showed. Even so, the mere presence of visible uniformed officers (including security guards and even vacant police vehicles) is a well-documented deterrent of violent crime through, if nothing else, the “scarecrow effect.” If that’s not a practical enough reason to include cops at Pride, consider this: If an event gets shot up, and its organizers were found to have been negligent in their security protocol, they can expect to have their rainbow-colored pants sued right off them, and deservedly so.

In terms of politics, turning away or making adversaries of law enforcement is an unforced error. It is to the LGBT community's benefit to broaden support, further improve public favorability, and build bridges. Being mainstream may not feel sexy to young activists with pretensions of revolution and their fists upthrust, but it is the gold standard for cultural progress — it is the very purpose of cultural activism. The problem is, too many activists are desperate for a grand struggle to give meaning and direction to their life. The prospect of achieving their purported goals, of relinquishing their claims to grievance and victimhood, threatens to terrifyingly rob them of purpose and leave them rudderless. So progress is not allowed to occur — and when it does, it must be denied. This is what we must push back against. Your existential angst should not be a barrier to needed social progress.

After generations of struggle, the LGBT community now has a seat at the table, in part because sexual minorities have become integrated into nearly every sector of society, including law enforcement. The police are an important component of any community, and a highly-influential working class group. It’s mutually profitable to reciprocate their support for Pride. Plus, crowds love to see the fire department, police, and mayor in a parade — and the sexy cop uniforms are rather on-brand for the festivities. Banning cops doesn’t merely alienate law enforcement, it also turns off the 83% of the public who do not share the far-left’s hatred of the police, and the 77% of black people who do not want to see them defunded. Far from speaking for the downtrodden, left-activist views on policing often represent the sensibilities of affluent white folks who tend to live in low-crime areas and would be wholly unaffected from the blowback their policies cause. There is no greater sign of privilege, it turns out, than being Woke.

More fundamentally, banning cops from Pride violates the principles upon which the entire LGBT movement — and all of the victories it has achieved — are built. Prejudgement, discrimination, and exclusion run philosophically counter to the interests of the movement, and the liberal humanist framework that has made its progress possible. It’s true that police have not always been friendly to sexual minorities, or minorities in general. And while there remains much room for improvement, civilization has come a long way. Pride should not succumb to the same kind of intolerant “us vs. them” thinking that so characterizes everything it has historically stood against. It doesn't lead to the sort of society we want to live in, nor a society where minority rights can best flourish. Thomas Paine once wrote that “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” This is why principles matter. The choices we make have a way of boomeranging back. Hypocrisy is not merely off-putting, it’s often self-destructive, too.

The radical activist fringe doesn’t speak for everyone — and yet they have been doing so, and if we let them, they will continue to. Only 15% of Americans want to defund the police. Only half of registered LGB voters are Democrats — and over a quarter voted Republican in 2020. The American far-left, from which the activist class derives, is only 6% of the public according to Pew Research, the single smallest faction in US politics. In other words, despite their loud, passionate voice in the press and on social media, they do not speak for everyone and remain a fringe group within our democracy. To quell the perception that the LGBT community is little more than a subset of the far-left, and to do our part in de-escalating societal tensions that make productive discourse impossible, the community must stand up to the fringe, illiberal, queer extremism that is so determined to hijack our movement to serve its own ends. Diversity of thought is good. Free speech is good. Democratic institutions are good. And yes, respectability is good. This view of the world as broken down into systems of power and “oppressors versus oppressed” isn’t just wrong — almost nobody likes it. You shouldn’t need a master’s degree in postmodern antiracist Marxist critical queer theory to be part of the LGBT community — and thank goodness for that because otherwise, the past 50 years of progress would never have been possible.

The police belong at Pride, just as LGBT people belong on the force. What has no place are unfair generalizations, prejudice, and collective guilt. There is, of course, more to be done to make society a fairer place for racial and sexual minorities to thrive. We do that by building bridges and increasing representation, rather than by creating antagonism. There are no sides. There is no “them.” We’re in this together. “Pride” is about celebrating the freedom to be ourselves, despite the pressure from bigots, prudes, or authoritarians to hide, repress, or be ashamed. It’s about visibility, solidarity, and aliveness. But it’s also about how you carry yourself. It’s about your ethos, ideals, and values. Let’s have a Pride that does not turn anyone supportive away. Let’s have a Pride that sees the best in everyone. Let’s have a Pride that we can be proud of.

Published Jun 18, 2022
Updated May 31, 2023