I’ve been meaning to write a column on the growing threat — and reality — of violence to America’s LGBTQ community posed by right-wing rhetoric and politics, but it’s proved a difficult piece to write. Not because the “culture wars” around sexuality and gender are complicated — they can be, although the notion of loving all people for who they are is pretty simple — but because new, outrageous incidents keep topping the ones I planned to write about.
Literally as I hit the “send” button on a note to my editors about this column, it was reported that police in Baltimore are investigating multiple fires on a city street as a possible hate crime — which sent three people to the hospital — in which a Pride flag celebrating LGBTQ rights was reportedly set ablaze.
Officials there had good reason to be alarmed, after the widely reported incident just the weekend before in which 31 members of the white nationalist Patriot Front — the weird khaki-wearing extremists who marched through Philadelphia last July 4 — were arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, after piling into a rented U-Haul truck armed with riot gear, apparently with the goal of violently disrupting the annual Pride event underway there.
