End the Pride Parades hypocritical ban on gay NYPD officers

For the fifth straight year, the folks who run the city’s Pride parade banned cops from marching in uniform: Gay officers have to closet their NYPD affiliation to participate.The pretext that NYC Pride’s Heritage arm offers is that it doesn’t want anyone marching armed, and cops must carry their weapons when in uniform.Yet the issue never proved a problem before Heritage imposed the ban in 2021, at the height of anti-police obsessions after George Floyd’s death.Nor did anyone complain when NYPD officers responded rapidly Sunday night after two teens got shot near the Stonewall Inn.Plus, of course, armed police guarded the parade itself.

“It is the height of hypocrisy that uniformed officers are fit to line the parade route and keep everyone safe, but they are unable to march in their own uniform and under their own banner,” thundered Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who joined protesting police on the parade sidelines.“The ones being asked to stay out of sight are us, the gay, the trans, the queer, and our allied officers who have risked everything to serve both this city and this community.

It is not about safety, it is about exclusion” decried Det.Brian Downey, president of Gay Officers Action League.

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Never miss a story.Blame the way the extremists seem to grab control of almost every left-of-center institution, including supposedly single-issue outfits like the ACLU, or figure it’s just part of how the “unicause” mysteriously demands a single party line on everything from surgically trans-ing kids to denouncing Israel to despising the police.

It’s still bizarre to see the now-triumphant gay-rights movement refusing to recognize the full identity of LGBTQ cops.Somehow, the need to virtue-signal has New York City’s central rainbow celebrat...