OpEd: LGBTQ Pride Is Not Fair Because There’s No Straight Pride???

Guest Editorial

LGBTQ Pride Is Not Fair Because There’s No Straight Pride???

By Warren J. Blumenfeld

The town council of the small town of Emo, Ontario, population 1,333, voted by a margin of 3-2 to turn down a resolution to recognize June as “Pride Month.” Voting against the proposal were two councilors and town Mayor Harold McQuaker giving as their reason that it would be unfair because there is no “Straight Pride.”

Stated McQuaker:

“We have one flagpole and there’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin,” he said at the town council meeting discussing the resolution. “There’s no flags being flown for the straight people.”

So, would it be likewise unfair to commemorate October each year as LGBTQ History Month, or, in the United States, mid-September through mid-October as Hispanic Heritage Month, or November as Native American Heritage Month, or February as Black History Month, or March as Women’s History Month, or May as Asian Pacific Islander American Heritage Month?

Well, every month and every day is straight white Christian male pride, heritage, and history month and day. And why is that? Well, it is because in our patriarchal heterosexist white supremacist Christian-centric North America, white heterosexual Christian males’ lives matter more than any other. They are accorded an entire array of socially constructed privileges held back from all others based solely on the change of birth.

One day, hopefully not long from now when full equality and equity based on social identities has been attained and ensured, the need for Pride festivals and set-aside months to celebrate heritage and history would have evaporated.

When age-appropriate, full, ongoing, accurate, and detailed histories of nations become represented in the curriculum and taught in classrooms and in the larger society, then and only then can we end specific “heritage” and “history” months.

The negative vote taken by the Emo, Ontario town councilors amounted to a form of backlash.

New ideas and the movements they spark have usually, at least initially, appeared as challenges to the power structure and as enemies to the status quo. In terms of ideas that challenge entrenched systems of power, oppression, and privilege, forces for the maintenance of the status quo often wage figurative and literal battles to exterminate counter ideas and actions to prevent and turn back any gains progressive movements have fought so tirelessly to advance.

We see history replete with intense and often violent backlash from many factions against movements working to end, for example, the dehumanizing and oppressive institution of slavery, apartheid, human sex trafficking, and so-called “ethnic cleansing”; to advance women’s suffrage and movements for women to control their bodies; to workers’ rights; to the right to quality education and health care for all; to save our planted; to civil and human rights for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, for intersex people, for people with disabilities, for young people and elders, for people of all religions and for non-believers, for people of all ethnicities and national backgrounds, for equality of opportunity for people of all socioeconomic classes; and the instances continue endlessly.

Susan Faludi, in her now-classic exposé, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, details the intense resistance to feminist ideas and movements for gender equality. By shining an intense light upon this backlash, Faludi reveals and debunks the myths and stereotypes perpetrated by social institutions, from business to the media, working to restrain women in all facets of their lives.

Backlash on Campus

Imagine this: Today is your first day at college. You have been looking forward to this day ever since you could remember. Excited about living away from home for the first time with the expectation of experiencing new people and new adventures, your feelings are tinged, however, with a nagging and constant anxiety from which you can’t seem to escape. For quite some time, you have held a secret deep within the recesses of your soul. Here at your new college home environment, you don’t yet know whom you can trust.

Can you tell your dormitory roommate, and if you do tell, what will happen to you? Will your roommate tell others? Will you be thrown out of your room, or even worse, will you have to leave school?

And what if your parents find out? Will they disown you? Will they cut you off financially forcing you to drop out of school? And what about your prospective professors and classmates? If they find out, how will they react? And how will this possibly affect your chances for future employment?

Does your school have any resources and support systems for you? What if anything does your school have available to make your transition to college less worrisome and more accommodating? Overall, what will campus life hold for you?

You have had heterosexual feelings and your gender identity matched your sex assigned at birth (cisgender) even before you entered puberty, but because you live in a hometown and a larger society that doesn’t understand or even rejects your emerging sexuality and gender identity, you hide away in a closet of denial and dread fearing to come out into the light of day. Now you have a chance to make a new start in your home away from home.

These are the reasons why you decided to attend this particular college campus in this particular state. Back when you were researching possible campuses to attend, you came across an online article focusing on an action taken by the Texas House of Representatives, proposed by Republican State Representative Wayne Christian, which in 2011 passed precedent-setting legislation by a margin of 110 to 24 requiring all public colleges and universities in that state with a student center on “alternative” sexuality to provide equal funding and resources to establish and maintain so-called “Family and Traditional Values Centers” as well (to promote heterosexuality and straight marriage).

According to Rep. Christian’s amendment to the Texas budget for higher education:

“…It is the intent of the Legislature that an institution of higher education shall use an amount of appropriated funds to support a family and traditional values center for students of the institution that is not less than any amount of appropriated funds used by the institution to support a gender and sexuality center or other center for students focused on gay, lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, transsexual, transgender, gender questioning, or other gender identity issues.”

Representative Wayne Christian admitted that he would rather have seen the existing “alternative” sexuality centers defunded and, therefore eliminated, but decided that the bill had a better chance of passage by proposing the funding of so-called “Family and Traditional Values Centers.” He said the new Centers could now sponsor programs promoting chastity and marriage between one man and one woman.

Wow, it’s about time for the mandating of these Centers, don’t you think? These Centers on publicly supported institutions of higher education could now even sponsor programming for heterosexual and cisgender students to find and meet one another, to invite to their campuses heterosexual and cisgender scholars to present information on the heterosexual and cisgender experience, and help to un-diversify the curriculum by assisting those educators who so choose to include critical issues in heterosexual and cisgender studies, which now only comprise 99% of the curriculum.

They can also establish Heterosexual and Cisgender Speakers Bureaus and train heterosexual and cisgender students to talk about their experiences in classrooms on request to counter the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the fear, and the ignorance surrounding their lives.

Because of the new Family and Traditional Values Centers that have emerged throughout the state of Texas (which has the potential to trigger similar Centers throughout the nation), possibly we will see greater understanding of heterosexual and cisgender lifestyles.

With this understanding, we might find fewer and fewer young people having to live in a closet of fear, fewer hate crimes targeting people simply because they are heterosexual and cisgender resulting in injury and premature death, and greater chances for students to concentrate more on academics rather than on physical and emotional safety concerns due to their emerging heterosexual and cisgender identities.

We might also find closer family relationships, greater chances for career success, and overall, a new generation experiencing greater feelings of self-esteem and developing positive identities at earlier ages than ever before. These Center will give students the needed support and guidance when “coming out” heterosexual and cisgender. What a great and needed service these Family and Traditional Values will provide!

Oh yes, Texas certainly is on the (political) right track! Other states need to take note, or they will be left behind this new and exciting trend that will have far reaching implications.

And since we already have October set aside as “LGBTQ History Month,” I would imagine it’s not very far in the future that someone in the Texas legislature will propose the setting aside of a month, maybe December, dedicated to HSC (Heterosexual, Straight, & Cisgender) History Month. However, if that were to happen, the legislature would have to vote first to decertify the full year each and every year as HSC History and Pride Year as it currently stands.

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of The What, The So What, and The Now What of Social Justice Education (Peter Lang Publishers), Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense), and co-author of Looking at Gay and Lesbian Life (Beacon Press).