LGBTQ advocates are becoming increasingly alarmed as municipalities and school districts across the country take measures prohibiting displays of the rainbow Pride flag on public property and in classrooms.
Some say the moves reflect a broader wave of GOP-endorsed reform and policy efforts that include book bans, changes to school curricula, attacks on the use of preferred pronouns and restriction of reproductive rights.
“We’re in the middle of an avalanche of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ bills,” said Dara Adkison, board secretary for TransOhio, a trans equality organization in Columbus. “They’re playing that numbers game of, ‘What can we squeak through?’”
Such restrictions have been approved in Delaware, Ohio, and in Cold Spring, New York, as well as in school districts from Davis County, Utah, to Wales, Wisconsin. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, an effort to push a similar citywide measure there was narrowly defeated this month.
And in Florida, Republican state Rep. David Borrero has introduced a bill that would similarly limit flag displays at all governmental and public school buildings statewide.
How do these measures ban Pride flags?
The municipal measures that prohibit rainbow flags aren’t explicitly expressed as such. Presented as a means to avoid favoring any one group over another, they limit flag displays to government and military flags – but the effect is the same.
In the measure in Delaware, Ohio, city manager Thomas Homan in May 2022 informed flag and banner applicants that the city was pausing its program for review in light of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that month ruling that Boston city officials had violated a Christian group’s free speech rights when they denied a request to fly a Christian flag over city hall. Delaware’s program allowed organizations to request their flags be displayed on city street poles.
“While unfortunate for our local nonprofit organizations who use the banner and flag program to support cultural and community events, it is reasonable and prudent to take this step to protect the interests of our city,” he wrote.
A city spokesman told USA TODAY the review was ongoing.
On March 7, City Council members in Huntington Beach, California, are set to take their final vote on a similar measure.
At the council’s meeting earlier this week, board member Dan Kalmick criticized the proposal as cloaked in language hiding its true intentions.
“This is a poor and cowardly ordinance couched in ‘equality,’ ” Kalmick said. “It’s, of course, a ban on the city flying the Pride flag. Call it what it is. … If it walks like a ban and quacks like a ban, it’s a ban.”
Two previous council votes have favored the ordinance 4-3. The proposed measure notes that businesses and individuals can still display flags of their choice on private property.
Last week, Debbie Chang, president and CEO of the private foundation funded by nonprofit health plan Blue Shield of California, informed Huntington Beach officials that given the situation, the group had canceled plans to conduct a two-day retreat for trustees and senior management in the city in June.
“We decided that we could no longer in good conscience meet in your city until the uncertainty of this situation is resolved,” Chang wrote in a letter Friday.
Given the LGBTQ community’s high rates of health inequities and domestic violence, she said, the city’s move to ban the Pride flag “puts a vulnerable population at risk of further harm.”
In response, Huntington Beach council member Casey McKeon said at this week’s meeting: “I don’t know why they are trying to blackmail us economically when we are drafting our government flag policy to only fly government flags that represent every individual equally.”
Why is the rainbow flag important?
Gilbert Baker, a Kansas-born artist who spent much of his life in San Francisco, created the iconic six-striped rainbow flag in 1978 at the behest of LGBTQ activist and lawmaker Harvey Milk in 1978, according to the New York-based Gilbert Baker Foundation. He died in 2017.
The symbol has since become an icon of LGBTQ inclusion.
“It’s that age-old visibility, of knowing where you’re welcome,” said Adkison, of TransOhio. “The Pride flag is an easy way of knowing you have some allies there.”
Peg Corley, executive director of LGBTQ Center OC, based in Santa Ana, California, said Huntington Beach council members were sending “a very loud message” by considering the measure.
The rainbow flag “is the most diverse symbol we have,” Corley said. “Literally every walk of life is represented in the LGBTQ community, so saying we’re not going to fly a symbol of diversity and inclusion – that’s the message they’re sending.”
How is the LGBTQ community responding?
The Gilbert Baker Foundation, the New York-based organization named for the flag’s creator, on Friday launched a Save the Rainbow Flag campaign with instruction for local community advocates on mobilization and letter-writing activism, plus an open letter from the ACLU with legal arguments against flag restrictions.
“Make no mistake – right-wing groups want to roll back LGBTQ+ rights, and they’re starting with banning the rainbow flag,” Charley Beal, the foundation’s president, said in a press release.
Some such bans have already been reversed – for instance, in Newberg, Oregon, where school board members last month rescinded a controversial 2021 measure prohibiting political signage, which had included the rainbow flag, after the measure was challenged by the ACLU.
But, Beal said, “every month brings a new threat to LGBTQ+ rights and equality. It’s time to stop the haters.”
Corley, whose organization has been asked to participate in public raisings of the rainbow flag when Orange County municipalities kicked off Pride Month celebrations in previous years, said she expects more businesses to withdraw from Huntington Beach should the ban remain in effect.
“We’re people, not a political agenda,” she said.
Dig deeper:
What is the meaning of other LGBTQ+ flags?
Book bans are on the rise. Which books are being targeted and why?