A Pride celebration is scheduled to start at noon today in Ferndale in front of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which posted a sign during this month that reads, “Hurt by LGBTQ Culture? Healing Here.”
Participants are asked to come in their “loudest rainbow attire and with flags.” June is Pride Month nationally, though events locally have been held over the years in September, when college students are around.
The event comes on the heels of a protest yesterday at 18th and H streets in Arcata response to the destruction of LGBTQ+ flags at the community garden there. Vicki Fikes, who maintains the corner garden, found the flags destroyed earlier this week and posted about it on social media. See Mark McKenna’s photos of that rally in the slideshow below.
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This article appears in ‘Calculated Deception’.
Stupid waste of time. So many other issues at present that deserve attention. Just ask me what it’s like raising a nonverbal Autistic adult in Humboldt County. That’s real news, real concern, real struggle. Not someone’s narcissitic sexual preference. Pisses me off that this is what gets attention in our county.
What is a waste of time are people arguing that my struggle is harder than your struggle. I am sure that “raising a nonverbal Autistic adult is a….real struggle” anywhere in the country including Humboldt County, especially if you are poor or working poor. But that doesn’t excuse someone in that situation for not having the understanding that sexual identity is not a matter of the latest style or “preference.” It is a biological reality, in the same way that being born Autistic is a biological reality and not a choice. And in the same way that society’s understanding of people with autism has evolved to saying that they have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) because the symptoms of autism are varied, our understanding of LGBTQ people has evolved to see that they are normal people whose sexual expression is on the spectrum of human sexuality. It is noteworthy that what people with autism and LGBTQ folks have in common is that they both suffer from being stigmatized in the media and from acts of violence. Now more than ever we need to join all our struggles to make a more equitable and compassionate society. We can use Greta Thunberg as our role model. She is the Swedish teenage environmental activist who has Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of ASD) and who is one of the leaders in the struggle against the Climate Crisis and for a sustainable Earth.