Quakers mark Pride Month
The Meeting house was open and included a display recalling ‘key moments in British Quakers’ continuing journey and involvement in working towards LGBQT+ equality’.
Friends across the UK celebrated Pride Month this year by joining marches and holding talks. Helen Carter-Shaw, from Canterbury Meeting, told the Friend that people from the LGBTQ+ community, as well as ‘straight allies’, took part in the city’s Pride celebrations, where they ‘proudly marched with two specially-designed and homemade Quaker banners’. The youngest participant, Pippa, is ‘an enthusiastic member of [Canterbury’s] Children’s Meeting’, she said.
‘We thought it important that she experienced this, so that she knows that whoever you are, whoever she is, it’s OK,’ her parents said. ‘It’s OK to love someone regardless of their gender.’
Helen Carter-Shaw said Canterbury Pride started with ‘a noisy and colourful parade through the city while onlookers cheered and clapped’. The Meeting house was open and included a display recalling ‘key moments in British Quakers’ continuing journey and involvement in working towards LGBQT+ equality’.
Exeter Friends also had a stall at the Exeter Respect event in Belmont Park where they said they enjoyed ‘diversity, choirs and conversations’. Meanwhile Friends House put the spotlight on influential Quaker gay and civil rights campaigner Bayard Rustin to mark the month, highlighting the upcoming biopic Rustin, starring Colman Domingo.
Pride month started in the US to commemorate the Stonewall riots that took place in June 1969, which advanced the country’s LGBT+ civil rights movement.
Comments
This seems to be an appropriate opportunity to share my concern that Pride Month has become dominated by a focus on the Trans experience, and Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people are becoming increasingly marginalised.
It now seems that anyone who affirms that sex matters may be marginalised or branded a ‘transphobe’. Happily the courts are increasingly supporting people who hold gender critical beliefs.
But most worrying is the normalisation of ‘gender theology’ which is exposing children to the belief that any conflict between a child’s observed sex and stereotypical societal roles can be blamed on thei being being born inthe wrong body. A problem that can be resolved through irreversible surgery and a life long dependence on medication.
By Ol Rappaport on 30th June 2023 - 10:28
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