2022 Santa Fe Pride Parade. Photo credit: Luis Sánchez Saturno/Santa Fe New Mexican
This phrase, boomed over a loud speaker as I walked into the Santa Fe Plaza yesterday morning, sums up for me the whole glorious atmosphere of the Gay Pride Parade, the first I’ve ever attended. My rage and despair over the Supreme Court’s shameless action in throwing out Roe V. Wade—and fifty years of precedent—receded a little as I stood in the boisterous crowd, watching the parade pass.
Gay Pride in the little boy riding his two-wheeler, decorated with small rainbow flags; Gay Pride in the enormous green garbage truck, horn blaring as it moved down the street; Gay Pride in the slogans painted on the pickups: “You can’t pray gay away”—a reference to the Roman Catholic Archbishop’s endorsement yesterday of the Supreme Court decision; Gay Pride in “love is love” in the brilliant pink and purple dresses of the twirling dancers; Gay Pride in the floats sponsored by the local hospitals, a real estate firm, and especially in the Santa Fe School district’s big yellow bus, newly washed for the occasion, with students hanging out the windows. I doubt if any other town in the U.S. could celebrate Gay Pride with such a plethora of business and government floats. And with an enormous crowd composed of all ages and all genders.
Our political representatives were not there although a rainbow sign proclaimed “Michelle”—our fighting Democratic governor, Michelle Luhan Grisham.
What mattered most to me is that we were all together, the banners celebrating Gay Pride joined by an enormous banner proclaiming, “Dismantle the Patriarchy”—which is as it has always been our goal. There can be no equality for any group or individual until the structure of capitalism, fueled by destructive extraction and rampant consumerism, is taken apart.
To be replaced by what?
A friend suggested that this country may divide into many smaller units, and Texas is again petitioning to secede. This democracy, so called, founded as the song has it, “On a pack of Lies,” may not be able to create the unit on which its survival depends after corrosive decades of racism and its cousin, hatred of women.
But this morning in the atmosphere of celebration with bubbles floating through the air I imagined the powerful union we may now create between gay people, LBGY people, women of all tribes and people of all colors, a union so powerful three white men will never be able to sustain their ill-gotten power against it. The Supreme Court may look back in horror when it realizes that its action in throwing out Roe V. Wade has created the coalition that will defeat it—and the Republican Party.
Begin today by giving money to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains which is working to expand the capacity of our abortion clinics here in New Mexico, already swamped with women traveling from the four contiguous states which are denying them the health care they need—and then blow a few bubbles, dance a few steps, sing a song, and pray for the future.
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