What MAGA doesn’t want to admit about Pride Month
GOP Rep. Andy Ogles just accidentally exposed how nakedly homophobic Republicans still are in 2026. It’s about to backfire spectacularly.
With the start of June, we are once again celebrating Pride Month, a time when we embrace the idea that love is love. When we celebrate the best of who we are and the progress we’ve made as a nation in the fight for a fairer, freer future for all Americans to share.
Pride is also a time when we acknowledge the struggle we’re still in to preserve and expand the freedoms we’ve already won. As part of our ongoing fight, we must acknowledge the growing attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and the threat this poses not only to their freedoms, but to all of our freedoms to love who we love openly and with pride.
In stark contrast to the LGBTQ+ movement of love and understanding, Trump has sought to erase the suffering of the past and the hard-won progress of the gay rights movement.
On his first day in office, Trump rescinded every Biden-era executive order protecting LGBTQ+ individuals and couples. He signed an Executive Order to kick every transgender service member out of the military for no reason other than their gender identity. He repealed rules preventing workplace discrimination on account of anyone’s sexual identity (straight people included!)
During Elon Musk’s ill-gotten (and rather stupid) DOGE cuts, Republicans canceled dozens of research grants related to LGBTQ+ health, including defunding HIV and AIDs prevention and treatment grants to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
In perhaps his most blatant move yet, Trump ordered the National Park Service to take down the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument. It was only amidst withering public backlash (because — surprise, surprise — Americans actually support gay rights!) that Trump backed down, and the Pride flag once again flies above Stonewall today.
Following each of these moves, it would’ve been easier to roll over and accept the decisions rather than stand up and fight back. Some would even go so far as to say that such moves are reflective of the opinion of a majority of the country.
They’re dead wrong.
Polls regularly place national support for gay rights at 65% or higher. States across the country have held referendums where pro-LGBTQ+ ballot measures passed by massive margins. Or think of anecdotal evidence in your own lives — the grandparent, uncle, or family friend who (maybe surprisingly!) showed their support for the community. The vast majority of the country is in favor of same-sex marriage, equal benefits, and of the integration of the LGBTQ+ community into society.
That reality is remarkable precisely because it was far from inevitable.
For decades, it was seen as politically risky to stand with gay Americans. Democrats were told that supporting same-sex marriage, for instance, would alienate moderates and place the party outside of the mainstream of American life. Time and time again, politicians were told to triangulate, to compromise, to give up on basic questions of equality.
Rather than capitulate, millions of Americans organized, marched, and continued to tell their stories. Despite the long odds, the gay community continued to make the case that they deserved the same rights, and that “We, the People” meant all of us.
Slowly but surely, the country changed.
Pride Month is important not just because of the progress that has been, but because it tells us that progress is only possible when people are willing to fight for it with everything they have, regardless of how popular it may be in that moment.
Take the controversy surrounding GOP Representative Andy Ogles as an example. To mark the start of Pride Month, he posted a tweet saying “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.” Within hours, he faced withering pushback from voters, Republican leaders, and, well, basically everyone.
He deleted the tweet and embarrassingly tried to blame a staffer for his own fuck-up. Such language would’ve been celebrated by large corners of the country ten or twenty years ago, and yet today it is a source of universal condemnation.
In 2024, Trump largely ran on fear. Fear of the “other.” Fear of the immigrant. Fear of the gay or lesbian couple. Fear of each other.
Not anymore.
On immigration, once Trump’s strongest issue, he’s now deeply unpopular following the militarization of America through the National Guard, deploying ICE into American cities, inciting riots and attacking protestors, and the wholesale targeting and racial profiling of the Hispanic community. There are countless stories of immigrants, whether legal or not, being imprisoned, deported, and dying in American custody.
On reproductive freedom, Trump moved to block access to mifepristone, launching “studies and reviews” into the medication’s safety and efficacy. Trump’s hand-picked justices formed the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, gutted the Voting Rights Act, defanged the EPA, and a whole host of other generation-defining decisions setting the country back decades.
In each of these moves, Trump has been on the wrong side of public opinion.
Make no mistake: Trump wants us to think the country has turned its back on decades of social progress. He couldn’t be further from the truth.
America is a land of possibility; of a belief in the power of the People to determine for ourselves what happiness looks like. The government has no place deciding whether or not gay or lesbian couples can get married. It has no place deciding which history we honor and how we do it. It has no place telling others that our nation, one whose very foundation is built on immigration, is hostile to those seeking to share in the American Dream.
This year, Pride isn’t just about looking back and honoring the work of others. It also means looking forward and rededicating ourselves to the work of building a nation worthy of our loftiest goals of equality, happiness, and prosperity for everyone.