Pride Month: Why are religious conservatives so obsessed with sex and other people’s genders?
As June comes to a close, Hungary just had maybe the largest Pride Parade ever even though it was illegal
“Hungary might have just had the largest LGBTQ2S+ Price parade in the country’s history – and it wasn’t even allowed to happen.”
That was the lede in a story in Xtra Magazine today, June 30, 2025 (which is incidentally where I got my first ever paid byline as a journalist in 1999).
Hungary’s far right populist prime minister Viktor Orbán learned a lesson that he actually could have learned if he was paying close attention to municipal politics in Chilliwack a decade ago, as if that would have been imaginable.
The lesson is that in today’s global climate of acceptance of diversity and difference, overt bigotry usually backfires.
As Hungarians came out in full force on the weekend to show Orbán they weren’t having his regressive nonsense, so too did Chilliwack residents, property owners, business people, and First Nations thumb former mayor Sharon Gaetz and other religious conservatives councillors members who banned rainbow crosswalks from being painted in the city.
“With almost two dozen rainbow crosswalks on private land, schools, and Indigenous land, it is time for the City of Chilliwack to join the celebration, remove policy J-11 and install a rainbow crosswalk at Wellington and Mill Street,” Price said.
Policy J-11 was one of Gaetz’s last act in 2017 before losing the next election to Ken Popove in 2018, and it was her middle finger to the 2SLGBTQ+ community as well as a high five to her evangelical supporters all while dozens of other municipalities across B.C. happily made a seven-colour painted token gesture of solidarity with a long-alienated community. The far right bigots came up with some creative (if bullshit) logic to reject the idea of a rainbow crosswalk, essentially suggesting that if we start telling people that it’s OK to be gay then we’ll have to also say it’s OK to be a misogynist or a Nazi.
I call this the rainbow-fetus fallacy.
How it backfired on the religious homophobes who mistakenly thought they had control of the minds of a majority of brainless citizens is that within two years, Chilliwack had more a dozen rainbow crosswalks all over the place, just none on municipally owned land. First the Squiala First Nation painted rainbow crosswalks on their Eagle Landing parking lots, then Tzeachten did it, then the school board started painting them on school parking lots, all with the encouragement of Amber Price who spearheaded the campaign. She even painted one on her own driveway as did at lease one other person I know.
Price even reached out to the Guinness Book of World Records to create a new category. With 16 by November 2019, she figured Chilliwack might win the title of Most Rainbow Crosswalks in a City.
“I really wondered if there was an opportunity to create some friendly international competition to see who has the most,” Price said in a CityNews story. “If it’s us and we are the inaugural winner, that would be pretty sweet.”
None of that likely would have happened if Chilliwack just allowed, for example, the crosswalk on Wellington Avenue at Mill Street be painted.
More examples
As the B.C. Humanist Association (BCHA) shared recently – and I will note that I’m a BCHA member – Canada's foreign minister joined those from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia and Uruguay to recognize the rights of 2SLGBTQ+ people opposing transphobic and homophobic discrimination.
However, that list of countries is far too short.
“What's notable about that statement, is how few countries were willing to join the call,” BCHA executive director Ian Bushfield said in the June 30 BCHA newsletter.
Progress is progressing as it always does but there is always two steps forward and one step back from provincial governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan, from federal Conservatives, and from sporadic homophobic municipal and school boards across B.C.
“Even at home, we have seen threats to decades of progress come from politicians at all levels of government,” Bushfield said.
- City councillors have tried to weaponize "neutrality" against Pride symbols, which is a reference to Barrhead, Alberta, a tiny town north of Edmonton that recently voted to ban Pride flags or crosswalks from public property.
- Premiers are requiring parents to out trans students and restricting access to medical treatments. The first one refers to the Province of Saskatchewan that went to the trouble of passing a bill to require parental consent before a child under the age of 16 can use a different gender-related name or pronoun at school. The second to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith who is spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fight with her anti-trans hammer in the courts to continue to ban gender-affirming care for youth.
- Federal politicians have peddled in transphobic misinformation.
- We're even back into the era of religiously-motivated book bans, which in this case refers to book-banning activism in Alberta but also applies in Chilliwack where former school trustee and current MLA Heather Maahs has been rattling at the pulpit for years about her desire to have books she doesn't like banned from schools.
As the foreign ministers wrote in the quoted statement: "What is at stake here is a matter of full respect for human rights and human dignity, of strengthening equality, diversity and prosperity, leaving no one behind."
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Paul J. Henderson
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