In the never-ending battle for LGBTQ rights, two things happened Tuesday half a continent apart.
One made me more proud to be a Wichitan. The other made me less proud to be an American.
In Wichita, the City Council passed and presented a resolution honoring Pride Month.
The same day, CBS News broke the story that former Fox News talking head and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is ordering the renaming of a Navy ship honoring Harvey Milk, a gay rights icon and San Francisco Supervisor assassinated in his City Hall office in 1978.
In normal times, passing a Pride Month resolution in Wichita is not all that controversial. The City Council’s been doing it for years.
But these are not normal times. We’re in the midst of a great regression of rights of LGBTQ people.
The clash over LGBTQ rights has been in the spotlight at City Hall since March, when a proclamation honoring Transgender Day of Visibility went mysteriously unsigned by Mayor Lily Wu, who delegated the presentation to council member Maggie Ballard.
That has led to 22 ethics complaints against the mayor, which are currently under consideration by the city’s Ethics Board, and efforts by some Sedgwick County Republican precinct committee members to formally censure Republican council member Becky Tuttle, who cast one of four votes giving the proclamation a majority on the seven-member council.
In a stunning turnaround, Wu and all six council members voted to honor Pride Month, although the votes were split between two proclamations — one sponsored by the local Pride organization and another put forward by council member Dalton Glasscock, who is gay.
Both proposals received majority approval in the city’s clunky and goofy email voting process for approving ceremonial proclamations.
Glasscock’s was jettisoned because the other proclamation had gotten the required four votes first. Wu voted yes on Glasscock’s proposal and was listed as “did not reply” on the other one. But she did sign the proclamation and read it aloud from the council chamber podium. It was pretty much the same as last year’s Pride Month proclamation, but maybe it should have been different.
This was among the whereases:
“Whereas our nation was founded upon and is guided by a set of principles that includes that every person has been created equal, that each has a right to live their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that each shall be accorded the full recognition and protection under the law.”
Powerful words. Aspirational words.
But words that have been systematically ignored by the current regime in Washington, which is making every effort to erase from American history the accomplishments and contributions of racial and sexual minorities.
Across the federal government, websites have been scrubbed, books have been banned from service academies, and diversity blamed for everything from California wildfires to the tragic crash of a Wichita-to-Washington airliner.
Which brings us to the latest insult to LGBTQ Americans, removing Harvey Milk’s name from the U.S. Navy ship that bears it.
Milk was a Navy submarine officer in the Korean War, but was forced out of the service with a “less than honorable” discharge after being questioned by naval investigators about his sex life.
