Standing just steps from the Stonewall National Monument flagpole, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Feb. 15 announced plans to introduce legislation that would ensure the Rainbow Flag permanently flies at the historic site.
“The Trump administration’s removal of the Pride Rainbow Flag from the Stonewall National Monument is a deeply outrageous action that must be reversed,” Schumer, flanked by several out elected officials and LGBTQ community leaders, said during the Sunday afternoon press conference. “It’s an eff-ing disgrace. It’s just awful.”
Schumer’s legislation, which is being introduced in the House of Representatives by New York Congressmember Dan Goldman, comes less than a week after Gay City News first reported that the Trump administration quietly removed the Rainbow Flag from the Stonewall National Monument. The flag’s removal was followed by days of community-wide outrage before activists and elected officials defied the White House and re-raised the flag on Feb. 12. The flag remains on the flagpole.
The removal of the flag, meanwhile, represented just the latest example of the White House’s year-long series of attacks on the Stonewall National Monument, including removing the T and Q from the online website about the monument and erasing bisexual representation.
“I am introducing legislation to designate the Pride Flag as a congressionally authorized flag in America, and that means it can be flown here and everywhere else,” Schumer said. “No one — no one — can take it down.”
Schumer further blasted the Trump administration’s response to the flag-re-raising ceremony, which the Department of Interior said was a “political stunt.”
“They don’t have the foggiest idea of what’s going on with people,” Schumer said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s just so, so bad. So New Yorkers are right to be outraged because this is not about a technical rule. It’s about dignity. It’s about visibility. It’s about respect.”
Schumer recalled the day when former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, saying he was eating dinner with his daughter and her wife when they learned the news. Ginsburg’s death prompted them to discuss whether the right to marry could be taken away.
“That fear was real,” Schumer said. “And that’s why, two years later, many of us worked together to pass the Respect for Marriage Act to tell the Supreme Court ‘hands off marriage,’ plain and simple.”
Emphasizing the need for his new legislation, Schumer stressed that “rights that are not secured in law can be threatened.”
Schumer was joined at the press conference by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Manhattan State Senator Erik Bottcher, and Manhattan Assemblymember Tony Simone, as well as several other speakers, including Allen Roskoff, Melissa Sklarz, and Ken Kidd.
“We will not tolerate this,” said Sklarz, who represented the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City. “We will go to war. He has gone to war with immigrants, and women, and people of color, and the elderly and young. Now, just for the hell of it, he’s going to attack our queer symbols. New York will fight back; New York has always fought back. I am ready for this, as are all my friends.”
Hoylman-Sigal, in his remarks, recalled the initial effort in 2017 to designate Stonewall as a National Monument — and he pointed to the way in which the political atmosphere has deteriorated to such a degree that the historic site would be under attack by the president.
“Who would have thought, back then, that the federal administration — the White House itself — would issue a directive removing the Pride Flag?” Hoylman-Sigal asked.
He added: “Having this congressional authority behind us to protect the flag of our community could not be more important.”
Kidd, representing the Gilbert Baker Foundation, said the federal government “literally tried to steal our Pride” by removing the Rainbow Flag from the flagpole.
“That flag there harmed no one — not on person” he said. “It helped so many of us. Its removal was an attack.”
Schumer told Gay City News at the conclusion of the press conference that he would like to see bipartisan support for his bill — a key factor given the reality that Republicans, at the moment, control both houses of Congress and the White House.
“We hope so,” Schumer said. “When we did the [Respect for Marriage Act], we did get bipartisan support. It’s a different world, with Trump and all of his horrible, hateful minions, but we’re going to fight to get bipartisan support.”
Andy Humm, a Gay City News contributor who co-hosts Gay USA, asked Schumer about the possibility of bringing the Stonewall National Monument back under city control to prevent federal interference in the future.
“Andy Humm always comes up with good ideas,” Schumer said. “We’ll get working on that.”
Bottcher, like some other speakers, noted that the entire fight to re-establish the flag at the Stonewall National Monument shouldn’t even be happening because it shouldn’t have been removed in the first place.
“We have been elected to make people’s lives better,” he said, “To address the housing crisis, the affordability crisis, the healthcare crisis, to lift people up with policies that make their lives better. We don’t want to have to be here fighting about our Pride Flag. They’ve decided to pick this fight. They’ve decided to target our community — to intimidate and bully our community.”
He added: “We’re not going to stand for it. We’re going to continue fighting until we prevail, and we will prevail because we always have.”
