Your examples are in no way parallel. A specific police department, the NYPD, he is right now as we speak engaged in brutalizing LGBTQ people, especially transgender people and people of color. When representatives of that specific department march in uniform and staff the event as if the department were happy to support LGBTQ people, then a toxic pink-washing message gets sent whether or not the officers of GOAL intent to do that.

If GOAL officers were marching in civilian clothes to protest the NYPD, that would be one thing, and your argument would begin to make sense. But that’s not what’s happening.

I wish GOAL would do that. I wish they would take to the streets during Pride with signs saying they deplore what the NYPD is doing and they demand immediate, fundamental reform of a brutal, corrupt department.

That’s something just about everyone in the country could get behind and cheer for.