TAKE ACTION: Email the Polk County Commissioners
The Polk County Commission has posted the agenda for its meeting on June 21, 2016.
A few weeks ago, the Commission refused to vote on a proclamation recognizing Polk Pride Week, but they are all set to vote next week on a proclamation to declare July to be Lakes Appreciation Month.
In Polk County, lakes are a really big deal. Recognizing their value is important, but apparently the County values these bodies of water more than its own citizens.
Consider all the nice, uncontroversial things they said about our beautiful lakes when they passed a similar proclamation last year. The last line is particularly striking:
WHEREAS, Polk County recognizes the need to protect these lakes and ponds for future generations.
Is it really controversial or political to recognize the need to protect our LGBT citizens from hate and violence? No. Is protecting them really less important than protecting a pond? No. So why can’t they offer the same symbolic support to our LGBT brothers and sisters as they do to ponds? It is, without a doubt, the least they could possibly do.
Write your county commissioners today and encourage them to retroactively pass the Polk Pride Week proclamation and stand in solidarity with our LGBT community in this time of pain and grief. Our lakes and ponds mean a lot, but our citizens mean a lot more.
I want to live in a place I am not ashamed of. I want to live in a place that is moving forward, not standing on the wrong side of history. How about you?
TAKE ACTION: Email the Polk County Commissioners
If you have a moment, please take a look at my last post on this topic.
PkD_FL
June 16, 2016 — 7:20 pm
I think what they really meant was, we “need to protect these lakes and ponds” unless a developer wants to pave them over and build there!
Jonathan Edwards
June 19, 2016 — 11:10 am
Pride in what? In how a certain segment of the society chooses to have sexual relations with other people? Let’s take the bisexual-a person who chooses or was born with or created with the desire to have sex with people of his/her own sex or opposite sex. Where is the pride in that? The so called LGBT have successfully created the idea that they are a race of people just like Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans etc., but its really a movement based on sexual proclivities. Throw in the gender dysphoria people and we have a whole carnival of sexual players clamoring for rights and recognition. It is unfortunate that the response to LGBT movement over the years has been unjustly negative because they have turned that to their advantage to become a political and social force in the society. I guess we reap what we sow. As for me I just ignore your wailing for parades and all the other attention. You want to have sex with someone and you are an adult then go to it, but do not introduce yourself to me on the basis of what you say you are sexually. I will size you up based on the content of your character, not you so called sexual orientation.
Kemp Brinson
August 11, 2016 — 11:48 am
You dismiss sexual orientation as being about who you have sex with. It is not ( entirely). It is about who you love.
“It is unfortunate that the response to LGBT movement over the years has been unjustly negative because they have turned that to their advantage to become a political and social force in the society.”
Since I am not LGBTQ, I don’t want to speak for them, but your comment hints at the basis for pride celebrations, I think. They (justifiably) take pride in their community BECAUSE of the solidarity they must have to deal with the “unjustly negative” response to them simply being who they are. Many LGBTQ people aren’t even accepted in their own families. They have had to turn to others, and to each other.
Every human who is not a criminal should take pride just in the fact that they are who they are. Demonstrating that pride, and solidarity, in the face of the ignorance and violence that confronts them, is a laudable and appropriate.
Maybe if some people didn’t hate them, simply because of who they were, there would be no need for gay pride. It would just be human pride.
(Maybe that’s what it is, anyway. As a straight man, I have never felt unwelcome in the company of extremely proud gay people. You wouldn’t either.)