Clay Wirestone
June 30, 2025 3:33 am
On Saturday, June 7, I walked through South Park in Lawrence with my husband. We were browsing booths set up to for the annual LGBTQ+ pride celebration.
There had been a parade to start the day’s festivities, a parade we didn’t attend because it was pouring rain. But the skies soon cleared, and despite swampy patches in the grass and puddles on the concrete, the pride persisted. Hundreds of people circulated through the park, wearing an array of rainbow garb and chatting among themselves. A stage set up in the street played queer-themed hits such as Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.”
The crowd was a portrait of diversity — old people, young people, middle-aged people, of all colors and races, of different levels of physical ability. I saw parents with children, couples, extended families and individuals, all part of a giant toast to equality. As we browsed among the crowd, I couldn’t help but think how different this was from current narratives about gay rights.
- “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way,” New York Times, June 26.
- “Supreme Court OKs Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for kids, a setback for transgender rights,” Associated Press, June 18.
- “Hegseth directs renaming of Navy ship honoring LGBT icon Harvey Milk,” Washington Post, June 27
Headlines paint a movement on the retreat. But I didn’t see that in Lawrence. Instead, a saw a movement growing up, expanding its reach and readying itself for battles ahead.
I won’t deny that I wiped aside a few tears.
Liberty and justice for all might go in and out of fashion. But equality remains essential if you care about other human beings in both Kansas and the entire United States. So many people had dedicated their lifetimes to getting where we were that June 7. And many more will dedicate their lifetimes to making sure that we go on celebrating, no matter what.
What’s practical
In general, I believe that politics and policy should engage more with the practical and possible than the idealistic.
If two sides appear irreparably divided, participants should figure out what small things they agree on, rather then focusing on their most yawning divides.
For the overwhelming majority of public policy issues, this makes good sense. If your opponents want a lower tax rate, and you want taxes at a higher rate, you can you can compromise on a tax rate somewhere in the middle. If you want government to spend more on one kind of service and your opponents want it to spend less, you set spending in between those proposals.
We’ve watched Republican senators engage in just this kind of horse trading on President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” over the weekend. When people say that lawmakers should work together, they usually mean something like this. Find compromise. Move forward.
But when it comes to equality, this approach becomes much more difficult.
There’s no middle ground between saying that one group of people has the same rights as you and saying that they don’t have those rights and should be ashamed of asking. Compromising on full equality means denying it. You can’t be partly equal, or as the shameful U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson put it, separate but equal.
Compromise can still improve the lives of marginalized groups. Half measures can increase the range of rights and privileges enjoyed by one kind of people or another. For instance, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — or DACA — transformed the lives of immigrants brought into the United States as children. It did not grant them full citizenship, but the program didn’t harm them.
Still, compromise can grate on the march toward full equality. Civil unions did not last long as a compromise measure for same-sex couples. Both they and many straight people decided that expanding the definition of marriage to include gay people actually strengthened the institution. It was, and remains, win-win.
As the headlines above suggest, the LGBTQ+ community has recently experienced backlash. I had hoped that we might avoid this, but oppressors don’t like to see their carefully assembled basket of privileges overturned. They will fight wildly to retain their imagined superiority.
But it is only imagined.
No amount of racist rhetoric, homophobic grumbling or ultraconservative legislatures can change the fact that discrimination is wrong. Treating people differently because of innate traits cannot be defended. It will always be wrong. And those who seek to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people or Black people or Jewish people or people of color or any other group you care to name will always be mistaken. They will find themselves on the ash heap of history.
Pushing forward
This basic moral truth is why social movements continue.
This is why gay people and their allies flood the streets for pride marches — not just in Lawrence but also in Budapest, Hungary. This is why Black people and their friends and supporters mark Juneteenth. Those of us who know what it’s like to face institutionalized legal discrimination do not forget.
I am perfectly capable of holding a polite conversation with someone who believes that I am less than a full human being. But I know the harms their beliefs have caused. I will still judge them.
Those on the far right like to accuse anyone to their left of moral relativism. Yet I cannot imagine a more morally objective, idealistic goal than full legal equality for all people. When it comes to individual rights, when it comes to the freedom of people to be who they truly are, we can share a noble goal.
As a gay man, I’ve been stunned to see how far America has moved during my lifetime. I now live with my husband and son in a state where being gay was actually illegal.
I have no illusions. The job’s not done, will probably never be done. We still have much ground to cover in gaining basic legal rights for LGBTQ+ people.
Yet as we walked through that sodden-yet-heartening event in early June, I chose to focus on the positive for a few minutes. LGBTQ+ people will not give up, cannot give up, because this is who we are. These are our lives, and we are just as worthy, just as American, just as human, as anyone else. Happy pride to all.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
