Small U.S. town bans ‘Gay Pride’ parade, now targeted by nation’s top LGBT activist groups

A small town in Mississippi turned down a parade permit for homosexuals, who in response are filing a lawsuit and creating a national uproar.

Starkville city council voted 4-3 on Tuesday the 20th against a special event request to host and pay for accommodating the first celebration of homosexuality through their main streets. 

Attending the Starkville council meeting were members of the community speaking against the parade. 

“If anything should be held up and down our streets, it should not be this,” resident Dorothy Isaac said. “Do not turn our city into a sin city.”

“This is a very inclusive, a very friendly place, a very friendly city, a very friendly county, but every city has to have limits,” Rev. Thomas Rogers of Josey Creek Missionary Baptist Church stated.  “Cities without walls are easily taken.”  He noted that the parade organizers asked for a “special privilege.”

“God made Adam and Eve,” Isaac reminded the council.

Homosexual activists, including representatives from Mississippi State University who traveled two hours and a hundred miles to attend the seven-member board meeting, portrayed the gay and lesbian festival as a unifying event.  

“This is something that will bind this community together,” Starkville Pride’s Alexandra Hendon said.  

As things turned out, she couldn’t have been more wrong. The small town of 28,000, now virtually torn in two, has become the focus of national controversy and Starkville Pride has promised a lawsuit against the city.

Lesbian organizer Bailey McDaniel had said that the event was meant to be for everyone. 

“We want you to join us,” she said to residents.   

Upon hearing the vote, McDaniel, who was standing beside her lesbian partner Emily Turner, burst into tears. McDaniel’s photograph was sympathetically published far and wide along with the story of the town denying the homosexual parade.   

Having been turned down, Starkville Pride contacted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center to bring a lawsuit against the city.

Lawyer Roberta Kaplan, a veteran of homosexual lawsuits forcing compliance among a resistant Mississippi citizenry, said she will be quick to file against the city, according to the Starkville Daily News.

“Gay Pride” parades have a history of being obscene and offensive. The events often include hypersexual dancing, people who engage in mock-sex acts, as well as naked and partially naked men and women.  In many states, local governments have the right to deny events that violate community standards, but such local rights are shrinking.  

The ACLU responded to the vote Wednesday, warning the board that its decision “violates the Constitution.”  Mississippi ACLU Executive Director Jennifer Riley-Collins issued a statement calling the city council’s vote “disturbing” and demanded the board “reconsider...and approve the request.”

In 2016 the state enacted the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” which protects citizens and businesses from punishment by the government if they decline to provide specialty services for homosexual ceremonies.  

Governor Phil Bryant took a lot of media and corporate heat for signing the law, which also protects state employees who don't support homosexuality by ensuring they can't be fired for expressing their beliefs outside the office. Some states bannedofficial travel to Mississippi in protest.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the law to stand by refusing to take up the case on appeal.  Previously, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld the law by overruling an Obama-appointed lower court's injunction against it.

Kaplan fought against it.