Originally a comment by Sackbut on How about panvomit?

The city of Prattville AL is near Montgomery, and is populated by a lot of people who decided that Montgomery is too dangerous and crime-ridden. (Prattville is 73% white, compared to 29% in Montgomery; make of it what you will.) A common sentiment is that they don’t want to go to Montgomery for any reason, because of the danger. The city had a municipal Christmas parade recently, and Prattville Pride had a float. The city was not going to allow the float, because, they said, there were threats, and it would be dangerous.

At this point, liberal columnist Josh Moon chimed in, with a mostly well-put column about the cowardly actions of the city government. Clearly the Prattville police could not be spared to guard the parade, because they were busy fighting all the crimes in Prattville. So Montgomery residents are advised not to go to Prattville, because it’s too dangerous. Har, good turnabout.

Now, we know about the nature of the national Pride organization, and how it pushes “trans” everything at the expense of actually representing gay and lesbian constituencies. I don’t know Prattville Pride, but I assume they are not especially distinct from the national organization. Certainly there is a lot of trans advocacy in the area. But I agree that there is no particular reason Pride should not have had a float in the Christmas parade; I have more problems with there being a municipal Christmas parade in the first place. So long as other groups that might disagree are welcome, and they were, I don’t object.

A federal court intervened and required Prattville to allow the Pride float. The Catholic Church also was going to have a float (more reason I don’t like the idea of a municipal Christmas parade), but the Church decided to withdraw their float because of the presence of the Pride float. The parade happened, there were no problems.

Back to Josh Moon. He is very much captured by gender ideology, and he does not understand the nature of the opposition. What I find especially irritating about his viewpoint is something that he expresses on some other issues as well: those who disagree with him are derided as simply bigots of some variety or another, or perhaps all bigots are the same, and he has no interest in trying to understand where those opponents are coming from. On the parade issue, Moon posted on Facebook a transcript of a comment or a message from someone (I’ll call this the “correspondent”) who gave a very calm and reasonable explanation about their opposition to the Pride float, along with some opinions about keeping certain books out of the hands of small children, and keeping drag queens from reading stories or giving shows to young children. I don’t agree with everything this person said, but I agree with a lot of it, and I thought it was perfectly politely worded and well-expressed. The correspondent also complained about being called a bigot for expressing these opinions. How did Moon respond? By mocking the correspondent with something like “DoNT cAlL mE a BigOt”, and failing to address the actual statements in any way. The response seemed to me totally uncalled for and the opposite of what I’d expect from a decent journalist. He’s usually much better than this.