A PRIDE Message from AHRC Insists on Understanding, Truth, Inclusion, Unity and Focus ...

In these times of fear and uncertainty for the LGBTQI+ community, we are reminded to stay focused on the most pressing issues for our communities at risk, in the United States and GLOBALLY. If there is any PRIDE SEASON ever in our history requiring focus for the most marginalized among us, it is now. This is a time for PRIDE ORGANIZATIONS to display courageous leadership - which requires full and absolute inclusion of all LGBTQI+ people, and to turn our PARADES into a mix of JOY CELEBRATION PRIDE AND RESISTANCE. To accomplish this unifying our community and not alienating any single constituent is a necessity. This means not allowing our parades to be hijacked by outside agendas, least of all those who spread hate and anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric around the world resulting in the violence and killings of our communities. Your Pride Boards and CEO's have a duty to all of us.

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For as long as over 70 countries criminalize LGBTQI+ people, and we can now add our own country to this list, as over 600 anti LGBTQI+ bills have been launched statewide since the beginning of 2025, this must be our focus. If we are going to express compassion for other movements, we must do so with full understanding of what serves our community interests first and foremost. We cannot allow our own vulnerable constituents to be pushed to the back as if they do not count at all. Most of all - we all have one thing in common as LGBTQI+ members of any PRIDE parade - we want peace in the world - and we have every right to demand it. What we do not have a right to do is promote cultures that are killing us or calling for it, in their laws and religious dicta. This is counter productive and hurts our community in the big picture.

To ensure PRIDE remains focus, we deliver this message:

Call for Peace and Unity Among LGBTQI+ as we Head into Pride Month:

Posted on May 24, 2025 by Melanie Nathan

Some Prides and Dyke marches have announced exclusion of Jews, Some have CHOSEN TO honor or platform those calling for the extermination of what includes LGBTQI+ people. In making your decisions, you cannot escape the awareness that is a massive difference between calling for the eradication of Jews and their ancestral home versus calling for peace in the Middle East region of Gaza and Israel. Whether you like it or not, and no matter how you choose to define it – if you are participating or supporting any so-called resistance through marching, social media sharing, commentary, etc. which utilizes verbiage or signage that calls for violence, you are calling for the former and not the latter.

You are calling for the eradication of Jews and the Jewish homeland. You are not supporting peace or peaceful solutions, and you are exacerbating the current vicious cycle of violence in the region as well as the emerging American Intifada that began last week when two young people were gunned down at close range at an event held at the D.C. Jewish Museum, by a terrorist who invoked specifically "free free Palestine."

This INTIFADA, can be stopped now. With strong and informed leadership. Especially from the LGBTQI community! At the very least our PRIDE CELEBRATIONS should not promote Intifada.

if you’re going to protest, take off your masks (not referring to health kind) and protest in the name of peace. If you are protesting or supporting those who call to “globalize the Intifada” or chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, or “ Long live the Intifada” such as in music videos by Kehlani, using divisive imagery, you are not calling for peace or a stop to the killing of children, be it Jewish or Druid or Muslim, you are calling for the death of Jews, including LGBTQI+ Jews, as your solution, whether it is on the streets of Washington DC, on the streets of Amsterdam, in the San Diego Pride Parade, or in the Middle East itself....

That said…. you have choices … and so we implore...

May there be peace, may there be unity, may there be inclusion – and as we head into the month of PRIDE embrace your community, hold your friends, appreciate your family, and remember who your enemies are – so you can be a voice for the freedom of our criminalized global LGBTQI families who as we speak are suffering the most horrendous oppression – all at the hands of religious extremism.

MELANIE NATHAN

Executive Director

African Human Rights Coalition

commissionermnathan@gmail.com