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USA Today
5 hours ago
- Politics
- USA Today
As a gay man, I'm finally flying a pride flag. I don't know what took so long.
As a gay man, I'm finally flying a pride flag. I don't know what took so long. | Opinion Having witnessed one attempt after another by the current administration to erase LGBTQ+ people, I'm no longer OK with being a quiet gay. Show Caption Hide Caption WorldPride marched through DC for Pride month, in defiance of Trump WorldPride, The global festival promoting LGBTQ+ visibility, held it's anniversary parade in D.C. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never bought a pride flag, much less displayed one, in my 60-some years. I've been gay for all those years, and openly, publicly so for almost all of them, but have never flown the rainbow flag. But recently, lost in thought on my front lawn here in a small town in central North Carolina, I looked up at the American flag I fly from the front porch. Five years ago, I wrote why I decided to hang the Stars and Stripes, reclaiming it as a flag of all the people, not just some. I remember thinking I was making a statement about inclusion, equality under the law and, yes, patriotism. No one, no political party, should hold the U.S. flag hostage. When people ask me where I live, I proudly tell them, 'It's the house with the Stars and Stripes. You can't miss it.' A friend's flag helped me find a reason to show my pride Then, my neighbor and friend Pier Carlo Talenti, also a gay man, posted a photo of his charming cottage with a big pride flag hung on the front porch, seeming to wave at anyone passing by. He wrote, 'For the first time ever, I'm flying a Pride flag.' And then he went on to tell us why. Talenti was angry that the Department of Defense had decided to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, erasing the gay civil rights leader from the Navy vessel that has borne it since 2021. Milk was assassinated in 1978 because of his sexual orientation; Talenti was sure the announcement of the change had been made specifically to coincide with Pride Month. 'So petty and hateful,' he wrote. He added, 'I need my neighbors who … represent a broad political spectrum (to understand) that there's a gay man living and working here and making their community better. America belongs to all of us.' In just a few hours, dozens of his friends and neighbors had commented, all of them echoing this one: 'I support this message.' A friend in Washington, DC, added, 'Maybe a few of your friends will even join you.' Well, it didn't take long. A Louisville friend posted, 'We've never flown flags either until now. We've got one, too.' That's when I went online and purchased what's known as the 'Progress Pride Flag," which includes five half-size stripes in an arrow shape representing trans and nonbinary individuals, marginalized communities of color and those living with HIV/AIDS on top of the traditional rainbow flag. That particular flag makes a clear statement in support of everything the Trump administration has tried to erase. Opinion: I wrote a book on finding joy. Even now, it's easier than you think. Trump administration trying to erase LGBTQ+ community President Donald Trump and Republicans have made their own statement on the LGBTQ+ community. It started with Trump's anti-transgender attacks, central to his reelection campaign in 2024. Once back in the Oval Office, he called on Congress to pass a bill stating that there are "only two genders' and signed an executive order in January halting federal funding for hormonal and surgical intervention for trans minors. Erased. Anti-trans decision: Supreme Court turned its back on trans youth. Our community never will. | Opinion Then, Trump fired members of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, became chairman and canceled all the events planned to celebrate LGBTQ+ rights for June's World Pride festival in the nation's capital. Erased. Not having done enough damage, Trump has now banned transgender people from serving in the military. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he'd scrub the name of the USNS Harvey Milk, who served as a Navy operations officer on rescue submarines during the Korean War then went on to become the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. If all that wasn't enough, the administration announced plans to end a suicide hotline explicitly created for LGBTQ+ youth. Why haven't I flown a pride flag before? But it made me wonder why I had never done this before. I have been writing about LGBTQ+ issues for decades: books, columns, public talks. I'm no shrinking violet (one of the seven colors in the rainbow flag, and one of many more on some of the newer variations). My identity is no secret. Still, I had my reasons for not identifying my house. I live not far from Ku Klux Klan country, and in recent years KKK members have visited our town, white robes flowing and Confederate flags flying. They've made threats. They've left abhorrent literature on people's front porches. A 2019 invasion frightened many in town, especially my Black and Brown neighbors, who witnessed a hate they thought belonged to another time. I'd been fearful, too, and did not want my house to become a target. As a journalist, I'd already faced a home invasion from a reader who stalked me online for months, finally deciding to confront me by trying to break down my front door. This was in 2018, just before five journalists were killed in Annapolis, Maryland. There was another reason, too, which has only congealed for me. Over the years ‒ decades ‒ I'd changed. At one time, I had enthusiastically and regularly marched in San Francisco Pride, but I hadn't participated in years. I'd once lived in the Castro District (one of this nation's gay meccas), but I'd moved to the suburbs and then to North Carolina. I had once been single, but I'd married my husband and committed to our two dogs. My god, I even got rid of the flashy fake diamond stud that I'd sported for many years. Was it just age, my older self not being as out there as my younger one? Or had something else happened, and I just wasn't 'that kind of gay' anymore? I wasn't even sure what that meant, but it seemed I'd become the kind of gay who didn't hang a pride flag from his front porch. Well, I am again. Like Talenti and other friends, it's time for me to step it up. Having witnessed one attempt after another by the current administration to erase LGBTQ+ people, I'm no longer OK with being a quiet gay. It's time to be a more visible and vocal member of our community ‒ to be counted and to be seen. I've said for many years that I refuse to let fear drive how I live, not realizing I'd already succumbed in this very important way. I think of others in the LGBTQ+ community who live lives at much greater risk than I do, thanks to their sexual identity and the color of their skin, and I know that I need to step into the light on behalf of those who must still live in the shadows. That's why I've hung the pride flag on my front porch, for everyone to see. It's a beacon in these dark times. Now, when people ask me where I live, I tell them, 'It's the house with the pride flag. You can't miss it.' Steven Petrow is a columnist who writes on civility and manners and the author of seven books, including 'The Joy You Make' and "Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old." Follow him on Threads: @
NBC News
15 hours ago
- Politics
- NBC News
Trump is relying on a small circle of advisers as he weighs Iran strikes
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is increasingly relying on a small group of advisers for critical input as he weighs whether to order U.S. military action in Iran targeting its nuclear program, according to two defense officials and a senior administration official. At the same time, another senior administration official said, Trump has been crowdsourcing with an array of allies outside the White House and in his administration about whether they think he should greenlight strikes in Iran — a question that has divided his core supporters. Despite routinely asking a broader group of people what they think he should do, Trump tends to make many decisions with just a handful of administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the interim national security adviser, the senior administration official said. Trump also leans on his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, when he weighs decisions that fall under his portfolio, the official said. As he decides whether to directly involve the United States in a war with Iran, Trump has expanded his circle in some ways while shrinking it in others. He has sidelined National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, who opposes U.S. strikes in Iran, and he has not been routinely turning to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as part of his decision-making process, according to the two defense officials and the senior administration official. Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell pushed back against the notion that Hegseth has not been heavily involved. "This claim is completely false. The Secretary is speaking with the President multiple times a day each day and has been with the President in the Situation Room this week," Parnell said in a statement. "Secretary Hegseth is providing the leadership the Department of Defense and our Armed Forces need, and he will continue to work diligently in support of President Trump's peace through strength agenda." Trump is listening to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Erik Kurilla, the commander of U.S. Central Command; and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, the two defense officials and a former administration official said. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that Trump will decide whether the United States should get involved in the Israel-Iran conflict within the next two weeks. In contrast to virtually every president before him since World War II, Trump does not rely on senior officials to carefully prepare foreign policy and military options and then discuss them with him in a structured, deliberate way, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. He discusses foreign policy with officials in his administration, as well as a myriad of foreign leaders and contacts outside the government. But those discussions are more informal and freewheeling. As a result, there are arguably fewer opportunities for officials or senior military commanders to question his assumptions or raise concerns about a course of action, the two sources said. When Trump announced last month that he was lifting sanctions on Syria after he met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, senior officials were taken by surprise, the two sources with knowledge of the matter said. Treasury Department officials had no warning that he would make such an announcement, and no technical preparations had been made to carry out a step that required discussions with foreign banks and Syrian government officials, the sources said. Since he returned to the White House in January, Trump has drastically scaled back the National Security Council, which traditionally collaborates with other federal agencies to craft policy options and outline their possible consequences, particularly when it comes to possible military action.
Atlantic
a day ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Hollowness of This Juneteenth
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Five years ago, as the streets ran hot and the body of George Floyd lay cold, optimistic commentators believed that America was on the verge of a breakthrough in its eternal deliberation over the humanity of Black people. For a brief moment, perhaps, it seemed as if the ' whirlwinds of revolt,' as Martin Luther King Jr. once prophesied, had finally shaken the foundations of the nation. In 2021, in the midst of this 'racial reckoning,' as it was often called, Congress passed legislation turning Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day,' a federal holiday. Now we face the sober reality that our country might be further away from that promised land than it has been in decades. Along with Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth became one of three federal holidays with explicit roots in Black history. Memorial Day was made a national observance in 1868 to honor soldiers felled during the Civil War, and was preceded by local celebrations organized by newly freed Black residents. The impetus for MLK Day came about with King's assassination exactly a century later, after which civil-rights groups and King's closest associates campaigned for the named holiday. Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day both originated in times when the Black freedom struggle faced its greatest challenges. Juneteenth—an emancipation celebration popularized during Reconstruction—was codified during what purported to be a transformation in America's racial consciousness. But, like its predecessors, Juneteenth joined the federal-holiday ranks just as Americans also decided en masse that they were done with all that. The 1870s saw the radical promise of Reconstruction give way to Jim Crow; the 1960s gave way to the nihilism and race-baiting of the Nixonian and Reaganite years. In 2024, the election of Donald Trump to a second term signaled a national retreat from racial egalitarianism. In his first months as president, he has moved the country in that direction more quickly than many imagined he would. Trump has set fire to billions of dollars of contracts in the name of eliminating 'DEI,' according to the White House. His legislative agenda threatens to strip federal health care and disaster aid for populations that are disproportionately Black. The Department of Defense has defenestrated Black veterans in death, removing their names from government websites and restoring the old names of bases that originally honored Confederate officers. The Federal Aviation Administration plans to spend millions of dollars to investigate whether recruiting Black air-traffic controllers (among other minority groups) has caused more plane crashes. The Smithsonian and its constituents have come under attack for daring to present artifacts about slavery and segregation. Books about Black history are being disappeared from schools and libraries. The secretary of education has suggested that public-school lessons about the truth of slavery and Jim Crow might themselves be illegal. There were, perhaps, other possible outcomes after 2020, but they didn't come to pass. The Democratic Party harnessed King's whirlwinds of revolt to power its mighty machine, promising to transform America and prioritize racial justice. Corporations donned the mask of 'wokeness'; people sent CashApp 'reparations' and listened and learned. But the donations to racial-justice initiatives soon dried up. The party supported a war in Gaza that fundamentally undercut any claim to its moral authority, especially among many young Black folks who felt kinship with the Palestinians in their plight. When DEI emerged as a boogeyman on the far right, many corporate leaders and politicians started to slink away from previous commitments to equity. Democratic Party leadership underestimated the anti-anti-racism movement, and seemed to genuinely believe that earned racial progress would endure on its own. The backlash that anybody who'd studied history said would come came, and the country was unprepared. Trump and his allies spend a lot of time talking about indoctrination and banning DEI. But by and large, the campaign against 'wokeness' has always been a canard. The true quarries of Trump's movement are the actual policies and structures that made progress possible. Affirmative action is done, and Black entrance rates at some selective schools have already plummeted. Our existing federal protections against discrimination in workplaces, housing, health care, and pollution are being peeled back layer by layer. The 1964 Civil Rights Act might be a dead letter, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act is in perpetual danger of losing the last of its teeth. The Fourteenth Amendment itself stands in tatters. Five years after Democratic congresspeople knelt on the floor in kente cloth for nearly nine minutes, the holiday is all that really remains. This puts the oddness of today in stark relief. The purpose of Juneteenth was always a celebration of emancipation, of the Black community's emergence out of our gloomy past. But it was also an implicit warning that what had been done could be done again. Now millions of schoolchildren will enjoy a holiday commemorating parts of our history that the federal government believes might be illegal to teach them about. I once advocated for Juneteenth as a national holiday, on the grounds that the celebration would prompt more people to become familiar with the rich history of emancipation and Black folks' agency in that. But, as it turns out, transforming Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day' against the backdrop of the past few years of retrenchment simply creates another instance of hypocrisy. What we were promised was a reckoning, whatever that meant. What we got was a day off.
Indianapolis Star
a day ago
- Politics
- Indianapolis Star
Trump is failing at everything. We must hope he succeeds against Iran.
The Trump administration is failing. DOGE's budget-cutting efforts appear to have cost taxpayers more than they saved, the expulsion rate of illegal immigrants trails Biden-era rates and we are in a trade war that will force an embarrassing national retreat – but only after damaging our economy. Internationally, we have more fractured alliances today than at any time in the last century. Friend and foe alike are puzzled by Trump's behavior, as well as his unqualified cabinet picks at the Department of Defense and Department of National Intelligence. None of this is lost on Americans, placing Trump as the lowest-polling president in modern history. One need not be a cynic to suppose that Trump could view victory against Iran as a welcome distraction from his domestic struggles. Yet even those of us who question Trump's competence should recognize that his administration now confronts a genuine national security challenge that transcends partisan politics. As Trump weighs military strikes against Iran's uranium enrichment sites, Americans who oppose him can still hope he succeeds in neutralizing a decades-long threat. The case against Iran's regime stands on its own merits, independent of one's view of Trump's presidency. Iran has been exporting terror for more than 45 years. Its government has funded terrorists and state actors against the U.S., Israel and most other Middle Eastern countries. Iran imprisoned our embassy staff, killed marine peacekeepers, and captured sailors. It has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, tens of thousands of Iranians, and hundreds of thousands of other people across the Middle East. Destroying the Iranian government, its nuclear capacity and its ability to make war and export terror would make the world an objectively better place. Even a large majority of Iranians favor a different government. The challenge lies in the execution. The U.S. has been planning war with Iran since the late 1970s. Much of our force structure since the 1980s was in response to Iranian aggression. Indeed, the success of Desert Storm was partly a consequence of the training and preparation we undertook to fight Iran, not Iraq. The U.S. and Israel can, with relative speed, stop the Iranian economy, close its ports and end its oil exports. We can destroy its government agencies, scatter surviving leadership, destroy its air force and navy, cut off its armed forces from key supplies and destroy most arms stockpiles. We can attrit its air defenses, target its ballistic missile sites and generally render it unable to defend itself. The destruction of Iran would give democratically minded leaders across the Middle East time and space to expand their influence and power. We should increase foreign aid to these nations, especially through USAID, but Elon Musk has gutted that capacity at a time when it might be more important than ever. Conflict with Iran will be costly. We will lose men and women in that fight, and should expect for some of the worst images of war to appear before the American people. We will lose air crews, see our bases in the Middle East targeted, our ships fired upon and attacks to occur on American targets wherever Iran has pre-positioned terrorists. In a war with Iran, Americans should expect to be attacked at home. This is why Trump's leadership deficiencies are so concerning. His poor policy judgment, incoherent planning, sloppy crisis management and poorly staffed war cabinet represent exactly the wrong combination for such a complex undertaking. No American president has been less prepared to sell the case for war, build necessary coalitions or execute the careful strategy such an operation demands. If Americans are to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and send the flower of their youth into harm's way, Trump owes us a clear explanation of costs, benefits, and realistic war aims. We cannot expect air power alone to achieve "regime change" or "unconditional surrender" — hope is not a plan. If ground forces may be necessary, he must say so. Trump must prepare Americans for casualties at home and abroad, distinguish between the Iranian people and their government, and build bipartisan congressional support. His failure to maintain international alliances means Israel stands as our only partner — a diplomatic catastrophe that makes success far more difficult. Nothing in Trump's personal or public history suggests he can provide this kind of thoughtful leadership. The stakes demand we hope he proves us wrong. If he rises to the occasion, Americans should support him. If he cannot, he will likely fail, at enormous cost to the world.
The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
What to know about the 'bunker buster' bomb amid Israel-Iran conflict
"There's a big difference between now and a week ago," Trump told reporters outside the White House. "Nobody knows what I'm going to do." More: How does a bunker-buster bomb work? A closer look at the GBU-57 Israel has its sights trained on taking out Iran's nuclear facilities, a feat it wants the U.S. military to help with, according to USA TODAY reporting. Iran's Fordo nuclear facility - central to its uranium enrichment efforts - is buried around 300 feet underground, unreachable to non-penetrating bombs. Israel's penetrating weapons cannot reach these underground facilities, a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY, as they require 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, or "bunker-busters." Only U.S.-made B-2 warplanes are equipped to carry the bombs. Here's what to know about this "bunker buster" bomb, the GBU-57. What is the Massive Ordnance Penetrator? The Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) is a weapon system designed to destroy weapons of mass destruction located in well-protected facilities, according to the U.S. Air Force. It can only be delivered by the U.S. B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. How deep can a 'bunker buster' bomb go? The Guided Bomb Unit (GBU) 57, also called the "bunker buster," is a large, GPS-guided, penetrating weapon designed to attack deeply buried targets such as bunkers and tunnels, according to the Department of Defense's office for weapons tests and evaluations. It weighs 30,000 pounds, and while previous reports suggest it can penetrate 200 feet into the ground, there have been a number of updates to the bomb over the past several years, including a $21 million update contract in 2019, that could have increased its reach and other capabilities. Contributing: Cybele Mayes-Osterman and Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY; Reuters. Kathryn Palmer is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at kapalmer@ and on X @KathrynPlmr.
