that NYT op-ed made me facepalm so hard I fear I might have a concussion.

(emphasis added in all these quotes)

Ms. Arboleda is a sergeant in the New York Police Department; she is also a lesbian and feels most connected to the L.G.B.T.Q. community when she marches down Fifth Avenue with the Gay Officers Action League during New York’s annual Pride celebration, taking in the crowd’s thunderous applause.

right off the bat, typical police narcissism. the crowd isn't cheering for her. they're cheering for the parade as a whole. she is not entitled to receive that applause. marching in Pride and being celebrated by the crowd is a privilege. the organizers of Pride in NYC have decided uniformed police no longer deserve that privilege.

a ban on uniformed police and corrections officers marching as groups until at least 2025 — a decision that she called “devastating.”

this is crucial. cops aren't banned from Pride. cops are welcome at pride, the same as anyone else. they just can't wear their uniforms and march in a group with other cops.

this is Pride refusing to let itself be used as an outlet for police propaganda.

if there was a pattern of firefighters refusing to put out fires in the houses of LGBT people, we'd sure as hell also ban the firefighters from marching in Pride.

If parades are celebrations of community and history, the Pride parade is also about the joy of belonging — of being part of a people knitted together by shared identity and survival.

survival of, among other things...violence and harassment by the police. and survival of hate crimes that the police don't take seriously.

It wasn’t so long ago that L.G.B.T.Q. people were thrilled to cheer for every out person and ally who would march in the parade, including L.G.B.T.Q. police officers, who often received some of the biggest cheers from onlookers.

very typical small-c conservative position for a newspaper editorial board to take, even a supposedly left-of-center paper like NYT. "things used to be different. now they've changed. maybe we should go back to the way things were?"

Today, at a time when Republican legislatures are attacking transgender rights across the country, it’s a strange moment for the L.G.B.T.Q. community to be closing the door on some of its own and missing an opportunity to broaden its coalition.

if a red state passes a "bathroom bill", who's going to enforce it when someone wants to harass a person they think is transgender? that's right, the police.

if a police department in some red state wants to say "we're LBGT allies, and so we're not going to enforce this stupid bathroom bill", then maybe we can discuss letting that department march in their local Pride parade.

(cue objections that the police can't just pick-and-choose which laws they enforce...)

Taking a pledge to protect and serve your city should not mean sacrificing the chance to be included in a community celebration of your identity.

again, they're welcome, just not in uniform.

if a cop boycotts Pride because they won't be able to wear their uniform, rather than wearing normal clothes and marching...they're saying that their identity as a cop is more important to them than their identity as an LBGTQ person. good riddance.

Surveys of the L.G.B.T.Q. community demonstrate support for a more inclusive approach to Pride: A 2019 poll by Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News found that 79 percent of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans welcomed police participation in Pride.

notably, this poll was taken before the murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent protests and massive wave of police brutality that opened up many people's eyes to the nature of policing in the US.

I wasn't able to find a more recent poll, but I'm almost certain that the same poll taken today would be significantly lower.

The ability of reform-minded officers like Ms. Arboleda to participate in Pride was hard won, as part of a 1996 lawsuit that granted the Gay Officers Action League the right to participate fully in New York’s parade.

the 1996 lawsuit they're referring to here...was against the NYPD. not against the parade or its organizers. I dunno, that seems like an odd detail to leave out?

also, GOAL was founded in 1982. it took them 14 years and a federal lawsuit to get them recognition from their own department. doesn't exactly make a strong case for the police being on the side of equality.

let’s be honest: It’s a poke in the eye at law enforcement more than a meaningful action to address police violence

ahh, the ol' "you shouldn't be doing anything about problem X, because Y and Z are even bigger problems" canard.

yes, we should also do other, bigger things to address police violence.

but, within the context of the group of people planning Pride, this is a perfectly reasonable and meaningful decision. it is a much better decision than shrugging their shoulders at the events of the last year and letting uniformed police simply continue to march.

...or foster a dialogue about law enforcement reform.

how many decades have we been trying to "foster a dialogue" about police reform? we have sufficient evidence to conclude that "dialogue" doesn't do shit. the police refuse to be reformed in any meaningful way. if they're upset that they got "poked in the eye" about this, so much the better.

the ban lasts until 2025. instead of whining about it, maybe they can get their shit together and actually reform themselves so that Pride welcomes them back in 2025. seems unlikely, but the fact that they're probably not going to even try really tells you all you need to know about the police relationship with LGBT people.

Two years ago, the department took a landmark step in apologizing for what it did during the Stonewall uprising. “The actions taken by the N.Y.P.D. were wrong — plain and simple,” said the commissioner at the time, James P. O’Neill.

wow, 2 years ago! that's only *checks notes* 50 years after it happened. what a progressive organization. clearly a strong LGBT ally.