A New Brunswick mayor is defending her city’s new policy that would ban displaying Pride banners on lampposts in the community — a move a local LGBTQ group says sends a harmful message.
During a council meeting Tuesday, Woodstock, N.B., Mayor Trina Jones said the previous practice of hanging Pride banners in the city would end under a policy passed in November that said lamppost banners should not harm Woodstock-area tourism or heritage. Will be reserved for promotion.
Amanda Lightbody, head of the non-profit LGBTQ+ organization The Rainbow Crosswalk, says removing the rainbow-colored Pride flags that have hung on lampposts in the summer for several years is “a step backward” for the community.
“People in our community who are anti-LGBTQIA, when they see that there’s something that they don’t like – that they hate – is being removed without any real explanation, they want to do it without a prompt from the government. “They don’t even like the gay community,” Lightbody said in an interview Friday.
He said the city’s policy is already being praised for its role in online homophobic hate groups.
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In an email statement Friday, Jones declined to be interviewed and said the council was satisfied with the information shared at its most recent meeting.
At that meeting, Jones stressed that the purpose of the policy was not the Pride flag. He said the city is “not defined” by its past practice of displaying the flag on lampposts for six weeks of the year.
Jones said, “I think it’s important for all of us to take a step back and try and determine why a flag that is meant to unify is having the opposite effect and creating division in many ways.” Used to be.”
In 2017, a newly painted Pride rainbow sidewalk in a western New Brunswick city was vandalized before being promptly repainted. The Lightbody group is named after this incident and is inspired by “the spirit of people united in support” after that vandalism.
Lightbody said the council at the time ultimately decided it was too expensive to repaint the rainbow sidewalk, so instead the city displayed Pride banners for six weeks over the summer.
Lightbody said since Tuesday’s council meeting several local businesses have reached out and offered to display Pride flags in their storefronts.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 3, 2024.
© 2024 The Canadian Press