Madrid (EFE).- The LGTBI Pride events start this Friday in dozens of municipalities in the country, a long week of celebrations and demonstrations with a special political charge in this edition due to the fear of many activists that the entry of Vox in different governments threaten their rights.
Although the traditional and massive march in Madrid is scheduled for July 1, this Saturday there will be demonstrations in numerous cities, such as Valencia, Seville or Logroño.
The party and the music predominate in the scheduled events, but the organizers have made it clear when presenting the agendas this week that Pride is “political”.
For the general coordinator of Madrid MADO Pride, Juan Carlos Alonso, it should be used to defend and vindicate the rights of the collective “at a time when the advance of hate speech from the extreme right seems to be entering many governments of Europe”.
The events in the capital, which attract hundreds of thousands of visitors, begin this Friday and will have its big day on Saturday, July 1, with the state demonstration of LGTBI Pride, for which the motto “Embracing family diversity: equal in rights”.
The Municipal Police will deploy 450 agents and Samur-Civil Protection will have one hundred troops during the celebrations; The City Council has also planned a cleaning operation similar to the one designed for the 2017 World Pride.
In Barcelona there will also be a demonstration on the 1st, but the big march will take place on the 15th, since Pride! BCN, the city’s traditional LGTBI festival, has been delayed this year and will take place from July 3 to 16.
flags and virgins
Parallel to the party, the fight to place or not the rainbow flag on the balconies of the town halls is also still active.
The mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has repeatedly said that the flag will not fly from the top of the Palacio de Cibeles, as Más Madrid and PSOE have been demanding, but this year the LGTBI colors look very close, since the main Post Office, which is located in the same headquarters, has been adorned with a large rainbow vinyl.
In Seville, for its part, Vox has asked the mayor to remove the representations of the city’s patron saints, Saints Justa and Rufina, from this year’s LGTBIQ+ Pride poster.
And the controversy over the virgins has also reached La Rioja, where the diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada-Logroño has issued a statement to denounce that in a drag gala organized for Pride a person paraded, in a “disrespectful way”, with a model that simulated the Virgin Mary, considering that it constitutes “a real offense for Christians”.