Pride, Defunded: The Summer Of Gender Love Is Over

And the long march back to sanity gets a little bit shorter

April was a bad month for Pride organizers all over America. Last week, Taylor Telford reported at the Washington Post that corporate sponsors are eliminating or cutting back support, with many of the remaining sponsors asking to be “silent partners.” The budget hits to Pride happened right when “most are anticipating higher turnout, as well as facing heightened safety and logistical challenges” at Pride events because of Donald Trump.

According to Marty Zuniga, president of the St. Louis Pride nonprofit, holding a Pride event is more expensive than ever. “This year’s PrideFest will be encircled by 6-foot fencing, and Zuniga rented a nearby parking garage simply so he could shut it down,” Telford reports. “He said he wanted to ensure it could not be used as a vantage from which to inflict violence on festivalgoers. ‘It’s very scary times.’” Because of Donald Trump.

Of course, the definition of “violence” has been expanded to include misgendering, not to mention TERFy slogans like “TRANS WOMAN ARE MEN.” Zuniga is afraid that someone wants to go full Day of the Jackal on Pride, but perhaps he’s more afraid of ‘deadnaming’ than bullets. He isn’t afraid at all to name Anheuser-Busch as one company that is dead to him, since they stopped funding his two-day festival for some reason that is not named Dylan Mulvaney. He clearly doesn’t expect to hear back from them ever again.

Everyone is blaming Donald Trump for the downturn in funding. His wars on DEI and transgender ‘medicine’ are causing companies to distance themselves from Pride, companies tell Zuniga, which Telford repeats. This pattern appears across the April coverage of the defunding of Pride: blame Trump, the bad evil orange man, for companies backing away from a proven brand-killer. The LGBTQ2SIAlphabet+ activists can’t blame themselves, after all. That would require an honest introspection, a reappraisal of the list of demands on their agenda, and they are not built that way.

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The Summer Of Gender Love Is Over