On Saturday, California Rep. Robert Garcia told his state party’s LGBTQ caucus to be ready for a pride month fight.
Conservatives were protesting Pride displays at Target, convincing the retailer to drop a transgender designer’s items. Members of Congress had called for a boycott of The North Face after the outdoors retailer featured a drag queen in its “Summer of Pride” campaign. Even the L.A. Dodgers had disinvited the longtime activist group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from a Pride Month award ceremony — then reinvited them, after progressives fought back.
“We have to remember that pride started off as a protest,” said Garcia, who was the first openly gay mayor of Long Beach before winning his House seat last year. “It cannot just be a celebration anymore. We are being systematically attacked.”
Energized by a boycott of Bud Light — and before that, by Ron DeSantis’s parental rights battle with Disney — social conservatives see this year’s Pride Month as an opportunity to make corporations pay for LGBTQ-friendly marketing, especially for products enjoyed by children.
The goal is reversing a decade-long, market-chasing trend toward more LGBTQ visibility, and to “make that rainbow flag absolutely toxic,” as Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles told listeners last week. In the political arena, DeSantis has contrasted his approach to fighting “woke corporations” to Donald Trump’s, elevating the issue in the GOP primary.
“I think a multi-billion-dollar company that sexualizes children is not consistent with the values of Florida, or the values of a place like Iowa,” DeSantis said of Disney, in an interview on “Fox and Friends” yesterday, referring to the corporation’s opposition to a law he signed that restricts classroom discussion of gender and sexual orientation.
Source : https://www.semafor.com/article/05/30/2023/pride-month-is-a-war-brands-are-the-battlefield