This June, some Republican-led states are rebranding Pride Month with staid-sounding faux morality.

Instead of celebrating the rights and dignity of its LGBTQ communities, Utah and Arkansas are choosing to label this month “Fidelity Month.” They may as well come out and say queer people are “infidels.”

Tennessee and Alabama Republicans—supporters of President Donald Trump, a father of five children from three different marriages—have dubbed June as “nuclear family month.”

Alabama’s Republican Gov., Kay Ivey, wants the month of June to be known as “Strong Families Month.” Ivey, who is also a strong Trump ally, has been married and divorced twice and has no children.

It’s rich for Republicans to uphold so-called family values in an economy that is hardly suitable for building and raising families of any sort.

The hypocrisy is off the charts. And it’s dangerous.

For much of human history, Western civilizations have sought to shame and criminalize gender and sexual diversity. For LGBTQ communities, recent GOP-led political attacks and cultural erasure are matters of life-and-death. Hate crimes against LGBTQ people have surged. Debating the rights of queer people to exist has fueled suicide within that community.

Pride has been an antidote to the outdated taboos and dangerous stigmas that have hurt innumerable people. The history of Pride month goes back to the first Pride March in New York City on June 28, 1970 commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Today most major cities in the US, along with many smaller towns, mark Pride Month with marches and parades throughout June. They are joyful occasions celebrating marriage equality, bodily autonomy, gender affirming care, and the freedom of people to be themselves without fear or judgement.

Although not without flaws, Pride has aspired to be a life-affirming tradition, even spreading all over the world. The rainbow Pride flag encourages people to break out of heterodoxy and binary thinking—puns definitely intended.

The Republican attacks on LGBTQ people serve a similar........

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