The Trump administration’s removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Greenwich Village was “no careless mistake,” but part and parcel of the government’s attacks on the LGBT community, a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit filed Tuesday alleged.
The suit brought by a number of advocacy organizations, including the Gilbert Baker Foundation, Village Preservation, and Equality New York, alleges the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and others by taking the Pride flag down as part of an ongoing effort to erase LGBT history.
“This was no careless mistake. The government has not removed other historical flags at other national monuments, most notably Confederate flags,” the complaint reads.
The first Pride flag to be flown permanently on federal land, a National Park Service worker last week removed it from the site of the historic 1969 uprising that was sparked by a police raid on an underground gay bar, the Stonewall Inn.
Last Thursday, protesters turned out in the thousands, along with local elected officials, to hoist a replacement flag.
Stonewall was federally recognized as the cradle of the gay liberation movement and designated as a national monument in 2016 by President Obama, whose legacy, along with President Biden’s, Trump has aggressively sought to tarnish.
The move by the Trump administration followed a Jan. 21 directive by the Department of the Interior claiming the Pride flag at Stonewall was in violation of several policies that mandate only the agency’s flag, the U.S. flag and the POW/MIA flag can be flown in public spaces overseen by the National Park Service.
Tuesday’s suit accuses the Trump administration of engaging in a warped reading of the policies in question, which the suit argues expressly permit flags that provide historical context to national monuments.
The lawsuit asks a judge to find the government’s decision to remove the official National Park Service Pride flag illegal and vacate it, order the flag put back up, and permanently bar the Trump administration from taking it down without complying with the National Historic Preservation Act, among other forms of relief. The flag was installed by the National Park Service in 2022 under Biden.
The plaintiffs cite a laundry list of actions Trump has taken since his return to power to target gay, lesbian and transgender Americans, including removing the word “transgender” from the Stonewall monument’s website, deleting National Park Service websites that documented LGBT history, firing a Justice Department staffer for displaying a Pride flag at work, and banning the use of gender pronouns in email signatures.
“This pattern of systemic targeting of the LGBTQ+ community — combined with the starkly disparate treatment of the Pride flag — demonstrates that the decision to alter the Stonewall monument was not just a mistake. It was based on an impermissible animus,” the suit reads.
“This case concerns one flag. But it is about so much more. The Pride flag symbolizes the dignity and respect for which members of LGBTQ+ community have so long fought and so rightfully deserve. Its colors reflect the diversity of the LGBTQ+ community and the spectrum of human sexuality and gender.”
The Daily News reached out to the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and Amy Sebring, who has direct oversight of the monument as the superintendent of NPS sites in Manhattan, for comment.
