New York Times Columnist Counsels Readers To Seek Pay For Pride

Poetic Justice is an advice column that offers better advice to submissions at other publications whose advice has failed the reader.

The New York Times is out with a new advice column by far-left identity and culture critic Roxane Gay. On Sunday, Gay’s latest piece dished out advice on celebrating “Pride Month” by way of demanding corporate privilege dollars and proper pronoun policing.

The first submission of Gay’s Sunday entry featured a reader who solicited advice on how to handle parade pay at an unnamed workplace:

At my place of work, we typically have a presence at local festivals and parades. We have a team that does outreach events as part of its work. Employees on the team are paid to set up a table, talk about our business and sign people up for our membership program.

For some events, there is additional interest, so staff volunteer to join paid staff. One of these events is the local Pride parade. Many workers at my company identify as L.G.B.T.Q.+, so we typically bring a large banner and march together as a large group.

In planning out participation for this year’s event, a member of our company’s L.G.B.T.Q.+ affinity group emailed the entire group (approximately 30 people), the vice president, and the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion demanding that all participants in the parade get paid for marching. Is it appropriate to pay people to march in the Pride parade?

— Anonymous

Gay counseled the reader to seek compensation for “employer-mandated tasks.”

“It sounds like your company is doing just that,” Gay wrote. “If employees are required to participate in the Pride parade, they should be paid for that time.”

Seems reasonable. Except nothing in the reader’s submission included anything about the local pride parade being a corporate-mandated event. Although, given the vitriol of far-left social activism today, it’s not inconceivable that refusal to participate in such an activity would result in some sort of discipline.

“It would be incredibly meaningful to try something different and support queer employees and allies with compensation for attending Pride, especially now,” Gay wrote. “Instead of thinking about all the objections, consider why this might be a great idea.”

Americans might be better off considering whether “Pride Month” remains all that necessary in the first place. The month-long celebration no longer has anything to do with gay tolerance and everything to do with far-left activism. The reader’s employer isn’t engaged in virtuous activism as much as it is a campaign or corporate coercion to implement far-left social change.

Gay Mischaracterizes The ‘Minority’

In another entry for Sunday’s column, Gay encourages a reader to take a stand against red state laws that protect children from transgender ideology.

Here’s what the reader wrote:

I am a queer employee at a large educational technology company that serves the K-to-12 market. Several customers in Florida, Texas and other states contact our support line regularly to ask for help to bypass all L.G.B.T.Q.+ content. My company has not, and I fear will not, take a stand on the anti-trans and ‘don’t say gay’ legislation spreading like wildfire. Several colleagues have asked what the company will do or say about all of this, and we haven’t been given a clear answer. Worse, the answers we are given often feel like political doublespeak. I am considering leaving the company after a career spanning over two decades. Do you think I should look at this differently?

— Anonymous

“Given the challenges the L.G.B.T.Q. community is facing right now, you are looking at this in exactly the right way,” Gay answered. “If we don’t take unequivocal stands right now, we will lose more ground than we already have.”

Gay goes on to admonish the “disgraceful” and “terrible precedent that allows a very vocal minority to dictate everything from curriculum to health care.”

But who is really the “very vocal minority?” A cascade of recent polling shows it’s not Republicans. It’s Gay and the reader.

Americans overwhelmingly oppose the rapid proliferation of transgender ideology. According to a Gallup poll out last week, 69 percent of adults surveyed said athletic competition should be based on biological sex. Another 55 percent called it “morally wrong” to attempt a gender transition, a number up from 51 percent in 2021.

The numbers corroborate another survey from Gallup this month revealing increasing support for social conservatism. The number of Americans who identify as socially conservative has reached a decade high, with 38 percent of respondents reporting to be “very conservative/conservative” compared to 29 percent who claimed they were “very liberal/liberal.”

Even the Washington Post conceded in May that “most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows,” based on results of the paper’s own survey.

“Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth,” the Post reported. “A 57 percent majority of adults said a person’s gender is determined from the start, with 43 percent saying it can differ.”

But back to Gay’s point, it’s not Republicans who need to be reined in as the “very vocal minority.” It’s the radical activists demanding children who can’t even pick their clothes out to be given the unilateral authority to chop off their own genitalia. In California, parents who don’t enable the gender fantasies of their children can be stripped of guardianship and labeled as abusers.

As for the reader, if they wanted to be a professional activist, they should have picked another line of work.