Magic Kingdom

Disruptions at Disney, Free Choice Clinics, Bookstores City OK’s 720 Rainbow Street Flags Celebrating Gay Pride Month

Fundamentalist Christians from afar have invaded Orlando, Florida this week to cause disruptions at Free Choice Clinics, Barnes and Noble bookstores and, reportedly, to block entry to Walt Disney World as it welcomes its annual overflow of gay male and lesbian customers.

Barnes and Noble has been wrongly charged by these revengeful Christians to be selling child pornography, a typical ploy the zealots use to expand censorship.

“We all find ourselves in an awkward, difficult, even painful situation over this,” said Orlando Mayor Glenda Hood, “But having mutual respect is so very important.”

Over 200 fundamentalist crusaders had arrived by Monday, the first wave of as many as 80,000 expected from throughout the United States.  The zealots were greeted by an array of 720 rainbow flags, symbols of gay and lesbian liberation that went up both Monday and Tuesday on streetlights throughout the city.

A primary organizer of the “Christian” influx is Operation Rescue which has steadily lost money recently because bombings and shootings at Free Choice clinics have alerted the public to an extremism that accompanies anti-abortionist rhetoric. Operation Rescue’s leaders hope to regain their financial footing by adding a virulent strain of anti-homosexualism to their no-abortions agenda.

The organization launched its 1998 national campaign with 60 protesters Monday at an Orlando area Free Choice clinic.  Five “Christians” were arrested, charged with obstructing a road and resisting arrest without violence.

Many from the same group continued their protest at a rally at City Hall where they voiced loud “religious” objections to the City Beautiful’s plan to distribute the 720 rainbow flags to celebrate June as Gay Pride Month.  The flag plan, in spite of the fundamentalists’ prayers against it, passed with only one city councilperson objecting.

Tuesday morning veteran gay activist Bob Kunst awoke to hear himself quoted on a local station, saying, “God is Gay.”

Kunst telephoned GayToday’s offices later in the morning from within a fundamentalist-besieged women’s clinic. He held his receiver aloft so that office personnel could hear “25 gay activists and women” replying to the disruptive, shouting “Christian” protesters outside.

The slogan, “God is Gay,” seems to rattle the “Christians” most, Kunst chuckled. And, unmistakably, a chorus of voices—through the office telephone— were chanting “God is Gay!”  The clinic had become the site of a commotion that many felt was “uncalled for.”

Such escalations of sloganeering by each side, with the use of terms that throw new boomerangs into the rings of public discourse, are just the kinds of one-liners that lead, as does “God is Gay” to the asking of more questions.  

God is male in many minds. God has been thought a “He” through the longer part of Jewish and Christian history. It seemed odd thirty years ago to say “Goddess” or to use “She” in describing God. But why not—in the course of such revolutionary changes—identify the attributes of the Highest Truth and Compassion with Same Sex Love and Affection? “Surely,” say some gay activists, “same-sex love is equal in God’s eyes to love between opposite-sexes.  Love hasn’t got no gender. ‘God is Gay’ too.”

As the weekend beginning June 5 draws near, larger contingents of lesbians, gays, transgendered people, and bisexuals and their friends—perhaps more than 100,000-- are readying themselves to take the storied trip to the Magic Kingdom.  Some are clearly relishing their opportunity to walk hand-in-hand in Disney’s World and are going under instructions from non-violent lesbian and gay organizations to show their appreciation to Disney by heightened spending--a buycott.  Two dollar bills will be used for purchases by some, it is said, to indicate the convincing presence of the gay dollar.

Simultaneously, fundamentalists are arriving from throughout the United States under instructions from their ideological commanders. They intend to target, they say, the three great “evils” of abortion, pornography and homosexuality.”

Eleven attacks—in the last month alone-- have been made on Florida abortion clinics and by “religious” people that Florida Today calls “extremists”. Some area gay activists as well as police express a degree of nervous feeling but are reportedly ready. 

Several months ago an Operation Rescue-inspired-anti-gay demonstration blocked traffic for 2 hours on 192 in Kissimmee, near Disney. There was scant sympathy for the so-called religionists’ behaviors --among either authorities or locals.