The United States exports plenty of its culture to the wider world, although some of it doesn’t quite catch on. Case in point: LGBT “pride month,” especially in nations that are considerably less woke than contemporary American culture.
Take Mexico, for instance, where a group of workers for a government bureau has gone viral for tearing down a rainbow flag outside the agency’s central offices in Mexico City.
According to the Madrid-based Spanish outlet El País (“The Country”), employees of Infonavit — an acronym for an agency whose name translates to the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers — ripped apart a rainbow banner that had been hung in front of the entrance to the offices on Tuesday.
Rafael Riva Palacio, leader of the National Union of Infonavit Workers, who led the employees in taking down the flag, said the banner was something “unworthy” of display at a government building, according to a Google translation of the Spanish-language El País article.
“I personally and a group of colleagues cannot allow it, and as many times as they want to put it up, as many times as they put it up, we are going to remove it,” he said, gesturing to the rainbow flag, according to El Pais.
Collin Rugg, a conservative strategist and social media personality, publicized the action in a post on the social media platform X, adding that while Palacio was willing to “promote, respect, protect and guarantee the safety and human rights of the Institute’s entitled workers, as well as the LGBTTTIQ+ community,” he said the flag did not belong in front of the building.
“The façade of the building, as stated, is Infonavit’s heritage and it is not justified to use it for advertising purposes, having placed banners to commemorate LGBTTTIQ+ pride,” Palacio said, according to Rugg’s post.
Needless to say, this provoked a reaction from Infonavit officialdom — in this case, institute Director Carlos Martínez.
Martínez said that the decision to tear down the rainbow flag was an act of “barbarism, hatred, homophobia and discrimination,” according to El Pais.
“In a homophobic and sexist society we were always taught to hide, not to show who we are and who we love. The fight for rights in Mexico City was a watershed for those of us who came from states like Tlaxcala,” he wrote in an X post, referring to Mexico’s smallest state, the tiny, landlocked Tlaxcala in the country’s southeast. “It was a beacon of light and the opportunity to be proud of ourselves.”
“In community, we taught each other that love is the greatest force in society, we learned to take care of each other against a society that did not want to see us or let us be. But we knew that our revenge against that society is to be happy, to be dancing and joyful.”
But the Mexico City incident does at least signal to progressive powers of what can happen when ideologies are forced on those who have no reason to accept them.
I must confess to having been ignorant of the inner workings of Infonavit until this controversy bubbled up, but apparently, Mr. Martínez suffers from a delusion that liberals in the United States and parts of Europe have exported to the rest of the world: That toleration of an individual’s personal preferences must also be accompanied by openly celebrating those preferences.
Are you an Infonavit employee who believes in the concepts of sexuality and gender laid out in the Bible? Too bad! You’d better suck it up, because folks like Mr. Martínez demand that you celebrate them — or at least that you shut up and tacitly agree that they should be celebrated.
If being forced to profess fealty to values and principles diametrically opposed to your worldview bothers you, well, that’s a you problem.
And somehow, LGBT activists are stunned — stunned! — that anyone could possibly tear down a banner like this. Barbarism! Bigotry! Discrimination! Now shut up and play along with the politicized symbol you employees are forced to walk under every day, or else we’ll file another complaint against your troglodytic ilk.
At least Palacio and his supporters had the guts to tear down the rainbow flag — and have said they’ll do it again, as well. Apparently, Americans’ neighbors to the south have some modicum of courage left that the vast majority of us have long since abandoned.
