WorldPride - a Massive LGBTQ Celebration - Is About to Collide With Donald Trump’s Washington [VERTICAL] - video Dailymotion

TIME

Washington is about to host a global festival for the LGBTQ community and its allies—all while President Donald Trump is in the White House overseeing a government that is wholly hostile to the visitors’ goals.

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00:00The Washington Capitol region is expecting about 3 million people to visit for World Pride.

00:05Events start May 17th. They will extend through June 8th, and the bigger Pride celebration will

00:11continue throughout the entire month of June, as is tradition. But there is a sense that this is

00:17going to be a little different than when folks started planning this right after the pandemic.

00:22Since then, Donald Trump has returned to Washington, and his administration and his

00:26partners in government at all levels have really stepped up their efforts to exclude LGBTQ rights.

00:35The White House issued executive orders right out of the gate,

00:39banning transgender identities, non-binary identities. The State Department said that

00:44you could really only have male or female on your passports and have to match your birth certificates.

00:51It's been the same in Congress where they've even started policing bathrooms against transgender

00:58individuals and are using congressional hearings to misgender members of Congress. And the Supreme

01:04Court recently said that trans service members cannot wear the uniform. It's been a real coordinated

01:11effort that has left a lot of the LGBTQ community feeling very targeted. Against that backdrop,

01:20though, we are expecting two to three million people here in the capital region for the festival,

01:26parade, a march that is going to be pretty politically overt, plus a bunch of marquee entertainers.

01:35Jennifer Lopez, Troye Sivan, Shakira, they will all be in the region over the course of this

01:41for big, splashy events. But there is a sense that this is going to be a little scaled back from where

01:47initially was planned. Part of that is President Trump's order against anything passing for DEI,

01:54and that includes anything that deals with affinity programming. So a lot of government

02:01contractors, Deloitte, Booz Allen, Hamilton, they have suspended their participation and pulled their

02:08sponsorships. That has had a pretty chilling effect as everyone is tiptoeing around what the

02:15consequences of running afoul of Donald Trump are. That said, this does look like, despite some pretty

02:22heavy security precautions, this does look like it's probably going to be a safe and celebratory

02:29event. But it is much different than the one that organizers initially started planning in 2021.

02:35Thank you very much for joining us today.

WorldPride - a Massive LGBTQ Celebration - Is About to Collide With Donald Trump’s Washington [VERTICAL]

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