Activists cry bloody murder after a Calif. city council removes their identity flag

Activists showed up to make a fuss at the Huntington Beach, Calif. city council meeting this week. Their gripe? Huntington Beach, a city in Orange County, has decided to no longer fly the Pride flag at city hall. The city council voted only to allow government related flags to be flown. According to the ordinance, only flags representing the United States, the state of California, Orange County, the city of Huntington Beach, and the six branches of U.S. armed forces, can be flown on city property.

Alex Mohajer, president of the Stonewall Democratic Club in West Hollywood, insisted, “That rainbow flag celebrates what makes us different. It says, ‘There’s a place for me here.’” Mohajer, an Iranian American, has spoken out against the extremist Islamic government of Iran recently, but only with regard to the recent protests and political uprising. He even made a video talking about women’s rights, yet he totally ignored the rights of gays and lesbians who are persecuted and even killed solely for their sexuality. The fact that he is willing to use his platform to champion a Pride flag—an inanimate object that has become more and more meaningless to many of us in the supposed “community”—is absurd.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center also chose to weigh in on the topic. They said in a statement, “The Greater Los Angeles area is for everyone and yet Huntington Beach officials landed on a cliche and reductive approach to making headlines: marginalizing queer Californians (and potentially, millions of tourists) in one fell swoop.”

The statement further claimed, “For a city that prides itself on exercising its rights, it’s abhorrently inexcusable to infringe upon the First Amendment rights of the LGBTQ tax-payers; they’re sending us a clear message of hate and shamelessly putting young, queer lives at stake. Huntington Beach’s officials are taking a cue from the political playbooks of extremist politicians across the country — using their hatred of queer and trans people as launching pads for their careers.”

According to this statement, the Pride flag currently only represents “queer” and “trans” people. I wrote last week on gay erasure; this is yet another example. Gays and lesbians have been lumped into the divisive and derogatory collective nomenclature “queer”.

Furthermore, no citizen’s First Amendment rights were violated, as the statement suggests. Any mutton-chopped nonbinary “queer” in a dress living in Huntington Beach is allowed to fly, wave, or wear any flag of their choosing on their own property or body. Perhaps doing so will be a comfort when they spontaneously drop dead since, according to the LA LGBT Center, people’s lives are at stake because the flagpole atop Huntington Beach City Hall is not donning a rainbow every third Thursday of the month.

What’s more, many of the people, like Mohajer and those from the Los Angeles LGBT Center, protesting the removal of the Pride flag did not live in the same city or even county. Huntington Beach is in Orange County, but the city of West Hollywood is in Los Angeles County. While they are neighboring counties, some days the drive is over two hours. It is a stretch, at best, to call Huntington Beach a “suburb of Los Angeles”, as the Advocate did.

Parts of Orange County are Republican and conservative strongholds, probably one of the main reasons it is safer and cleaner than Los Angeles. In 2020, the city of Huntington Beach voted in majority for Donald Trump for the presidency. They clearly also elected those who are currently serving on the city council. The voters of the city trusted these council members to speak for them, and those council members are doing their jobs. Why people from other cities and other counties view it as their battle to fight is beyond me. No one’s rights are being rescinded. No one’s life is in danger because a flag is not waving in the ocean breeze. If you do not live in the city, if you do not view Huntington Beach City Hall on a daily basis, why do you care?

The Pride flag does not define us; it certainly does not define me. I pledge allegiance to one flag, the flag my father and grandfathers risked their lives to protect. The American flag holds a deep history and meaning, and each of us privileged enough to be born under her banner should recognize and be grateful for that. However, far left activists denigrate the flag, hoisting upon it the false labels of “white supremacy” as if it is a symbol of racism. These activists choose to pledge their allegiance to a flag whose history is shallow at best and whose symbolism is becoming synonymous with grooming and child genital mutilation. These unpatriotic people will find themselves on the wrong side of history when their false flag falls and the American flag persists, as it always will.