If anyone ever asks why there is still the need for Pride marches let them look at the events that took place over the weekend; the 41 anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
First off in the City that my family is strongly linked to Derry/Londonderry where a gay couple were attacked as they made their way home in the wee small hours of Saturday morning. Police are treated their attack as a homphobic incident. It has left them both heavily traumatised.
However, it pails beside what happened in San Francisco on the 4oth Anniversary of the first Pride Parades which themselves marked the first anniversary of Stonewall. There a man pulled a gun in the crowd shot one 19 year-old dead and injured two other revellers.
Coming on the weekend before the US Supreme Court decided to restrict the rights of city and state governments to impose controls on gun ownership. It makes you wonder how many more innocent lives will have to be lost before someone in America with the power wakes up the epidemic of gun related crime that is so easy to perpetrate because there is no control on ownership.
Mind you these are two incidents in more tolerant countries of the world. Of course there is a lot more at risk in many other territories. There are places where the state can take your freedom or your live for being who you are. There is still a lot more to be done, as the Amnesty Pride sticker said "Protect the Human: Love is a Human Right".
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