Residents of Starkville, Mississippi, wanted to hold an LGBTQ pride parade. They went to the town's Board of Aldermen to approve the request. They were denied.
City officials said the Board of Aldermen has not denied a request for any applications that have been properly filed since 2014. [...]
There was no discussion or comments from the board members who voted in favor of denying the parade request.
That none of the four aldermen who voted to block the parade bothered to offer up even a cursory explanation of why this parade, of all the parades in the last four years, deserved to be blocked tells us, and Starkville residents, all any of us need to know. The mayor was supportive; Patrick Miller, an alderman who supported the parade request, noted that rejecting it would likely turn into a national issue, as the board's deliberations had already caught the notice of the Associated Press:
He said if we vote to deny this tonight, there will be another tweet saying the board voted to deny the request and the Associated press has 12. 3 million followers.
“That’s 12.3 million people who immediately formulate a negative opinion about the city of Starkville,” Miller said. “It suddenly becomes what Starkville is not.”
He's right. It did go national—and now we're talking about what Starkville is and what it is not. It's also not the end of what should have been a complete non-issue, even in Mississippi. Only two residents spoke out against it—which is more than the four aldermen bothered to do. And over this little, petty issue of a small town pride parade, there's a storm comin':
As for the next steps, McDaniel said their organization will be contacting the ACLU, The Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center over last night's decision.
"We will be taking action against this," McDaniel said."There was no means to deny our application. It was a perfectly fine application,"
McDaniel referenced House Bill 1523, also known as the "Protecting Freedom of Conscience from government discrimination act" as to why their properly submitted request was denied.
That would be the notorious 2016 "religious liberty" law that resulted in numerous state and local governments banning their employees from non-essential travel to the state. The law was passed by self-described "religious" conservatives as a response to the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriages, and is intended to "protect" religious conservatives from having to recognize the legal rights of LGBTQ Americans if they don't feel like doing it. If the aldermen indeed, when pressed, claim that they blocked the parade based on their own religious convictions that gay Americans don't deserve such rights, that would be a case that could very easily make its way up the federal courts. Over a parade, of all things. Over a small-town Mississippi parade. Have fun with that, aldermen of Starkville.