Brazil to Celebrate Straight Pride Day: Don’t Rain On My Parade

I have recently been alerted through the Google-net that the city council of Sao Paolo, Brazil, approved a bill for Heterosexual Pride Day. This bill currently sits on the desk of South America’s largest city, waiting to either be approved or vetoed. You might be asking yourself what this is all about exactly, so let me tell you.

If you don’t know what LGBT Pride Days are, they are basically these giant gatherings of LGBT people in major cities (or anywhere, really) the world over where people can can congregate and be themselves, regardless of their sex, gender, sexual orientation, so on and so forth.

Thanks to the work of Carlos Apolinario, the representative who lead the charge for this bill, Sao Paolo just might get their “Straight Pride” celebration after all. Apolinario was quoted as saying that the bill is “not anti-gay but a protest against the privileges the gay community enjoys.” Another news article went on to state that Apolinario claimed that one of the privileges is the realization of LGBT Parade at Avenida Paulista while the March for Jesus was moved to the area north of the city (my emphasis).

He went on further to explain, “I respect gays and I am against any kind of aggression made against them. I have no trouble coexisting with gays as long as their behavior is normal.”

Awesome. I kind of want to know what his idea of “normal” is. Actually, I probably don’t.

This all strikes me as odd. One of the reasons for having Pride Days/Celebrations is because LGBT people are still scrutinized for living their lives as they see fit and are still being bullied, attacked, and even killed. In a world where everyday is “Straight Day,” the whole notion of celebrating “Straight Pride” seems a little absurd.

Straight people, you don’t get to have Straight Pride Day. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we all have a parade when we can start treating each other as equals and stop discriminating based on all the BS that we use to divide ourselves and use as a basis for hate?

When that happens, I’ll bring the balloons.

What are your thoughts on this?

Image by Clarissa