\n\t\t\t\t\t\tNew York politicians defiantly raised a rainbow flag Thursday at the Stonewall National Monument amid a boisterous, cheering crowd, rebuking the Trump administration for removing the well-known symbol of pride from the LGBTQ+ landmark.\u201cWe did it,\u201d said Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal after helping raise the flag near an existing American flag in a tiny Greenwich Village park jammed with more than a hundred people. Many onlookers chanted \u201cRaise it Up!\u201d\u201cIf you can\u2019t fly a Pride flag steps from Stonewall monument, at the National monument for LGBTQ liberation, where can you fly it?\u201d asked Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat who is the first openly gay person elected to his job. \u201cSo we put it back.\u201dRelated video above: Clarified \u2014 How did the Stonewall Uprising spark a movement across the nation?Until a few days ago, the flag had flown for several years on a flagpole in the park at the heart of the National Park Service-run site. The park is across the street from the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar where a 1969 police raid sparked an uprising and helped catalyze the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.The initial rainbow flag-raising, on a pole brought to the park, was short-lived. Activists, annoyed that the rainbow flag was flying lower on a separate pole, promptly took it down and raised it again on the same pole as the American flag, leaving the two flags on the same rope billowing in the chilly breeze.Jay W. Walker, one of the activists who helped secure the Pride flag in its eventual spot, said advocates would restore it again if the park service pulls it down.\u201cWe will keep doing this,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cOur community is not going to stand for our park, our flagpole, to be disrespected by the Trump administration.\u201dThe park service has said it’s complying with federal guidance on flags, including a Jan. 21 park service memo that largely restricts the agency to displaying those of the United States, the Department of the Interior and POW\/MIA recognition, with exceptions that include providing \u201chistorical context.\u201dThe Interior Department on Thursday dismissed the flag-raising as a \u201cpolitical stunt\u201d and criticized the city\u2019s Democratic leadership.\u201cToday\u2019s political pageantry shows how utterly incompetent and misaligned the New York City officials are with the problems their city is facing,\u201d the department said in a prepared statement.Activists who had pressed for the flag display consider its removal a deliberate insult that compounds other recent changes that they find objectionable and ominous, such as eliminating many references to transgender people at the monument.\u201cThe new Trump administration is literally stealing our pride, or attempting to,\u201d Ken Kidd, who aided early efforts to get the flag installed permanently, said in an interview Wednesday. \u201cIt is a form of identity theft, where they are truly trying to take away those symbols of what we stand for \u2014 those symbols of our history, those symbols of our progress, those symbols of our future.\u201dThe flag’s removal also drew complaints from a series of New York’s Democratic officials, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.A rainbow flag still appears on a city-owned pole just outside the park, and smaller ones wave along its fence, where a local volunteer maintains them.After Democratic former President Barack Obama created the Stonewall monument in 2016, advocates yearned to see the Pride flag fly daily on federal land. When it finally happened some years later, they saw the display as an acknowledgment of LGBTQ+ people’s place and visibility in the nation.Soon after Trump, a Republican, returned to office last year, he took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the U.S. government and beyond. In one such move, his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, renamed a Navy ship that had been named for Harvey Milk, a slain gay rights activist and San Francisco city official who served during the Korean War. The vessel is now named for Chief Petty Officer Oscar V. Peterson, a World War II sailor who received the Medal of Honor.Trump’s administration also has scrutinized interpretive materials at national parks, museums and landmarks and sought to remove or alter descriptions that the government says are \u201cdivisive or partisan\u201d or \u201cinappropriately disparage Americans past or living.\u201dThe park service has not answered specific questions about the Stonewall site and the flag policy, including whether any flags were removed from other parks.\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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