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Rantz: After years of pushing fringe political views, Seattle Pride rightly loses sponsorships

Apr 16, 2025, 8:53 AM

Photo: Seattle Pride Parade 2023....

Seattle Pride Parade 2023. (Photo courtesy of 成人X站 7)

(Photo courtesy of 成人X站 7)

For years, Seattle Pride has been more about supporting and promoting fringe political views than it has been about LGBT pride. And now it appears to be suffering the consequences.

In a KING 5 interview, Seattle Pride Executive Director Patti Hearn complained that the organization is losing sponsorships. And she has a “relatively urgent” budget crisis where she needs $350,000 from local donors to make up for the deficit. Naturally, Hearn blamed President Donald Trump.

“I think that rhetoric coming from the executive branch of the government at this time, the laws that are attacking members of our community, the executive orders that have been made, a lack of sponsors, that does feel causal to me,” Hearn explained to聽.

No LGBT community members are being “attacked” and, instead of blaming Trump, Hearn should have her team look in the mirror.

Seattle Pride’s anti-police positions did them in

Seattle Pride has made headlines in the last several years for its fringe views. In particular, the group has been .

Since the height of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Seattle Pride has banned LGBT-identifying cops from its march. That they claim to support the LGBT community when they intentionally erase members who hold jobs (or political opinions) they don’t like is tragically ironic. They effectively told cops, in a department that is incredibly LGBT-friendly, to stay in the closet. And they did so for a bigoted movement that just a few years earlier parade so they could make a political point.

They became so virulently anti-police, leadership previously that officers protecting the route not wear uniforms, “as a show of respect for the LGBTQIA+ community which has experienced much trauma at the hands of uniformed officers over a long history of criminalization of queer people and police violence against marginalized groups.” How laughable. Apparently, those hard feelings didn’t exist from 1994 through 2019 when police marched.

Can what seems like an anti-corporation activist group really get money from corporations?

It’s also clear that Seattle Pride is filtering any corporations through an ideological litmus test that extends well beyond LGBT issues.

Seattle Pride said that it will reassess its current partnerships. They said they’d be judging organizations’ “political donations and lobbying activities, LGBTQIA2S+ policies, ties to the weapons industry, labor and supply chain ethics, involvement in immigration and carceral systems, and overall public impact.”

Most of their concerns have nothing to do with LGBT pride because the organization doesn’t represent LGBT communities. It represents progressive activists. They push people away, not bring people together. That’s, of course, a shame. LGBT Pride could be less divisive, but they choose to make it so.

Seattle Pride pushes corporations away

Under the leadership of then-Executive Director Krystal Marx, a stunningly failed Burien politician, it willing to back the Seattle Pride parade.

Seattle Pride rejected an Amazon sponsorship because it donated $11,000 to Washington lawmakers the group pretended are anti-LGBT. They also said they didn’t like Amazon donating to federal lawmakers who opposed the Equality Act. That legislation would have infringed upon religious freedoms and would have offered protections for transgender female athletes to compete against biological women. There were also around medical and parental rights.

There was an ideological litmus test that Seattle Pride was applying to corporate sponsors and there was no room for any dissent on the Radical Left’s positions. Now, if a corporation backs Seattle Pride, it’s telling consumers it stands with the 20% on so-called 80/20 issues.

Corporations don’t feel bullied into supporting fringe movements anymore

Despite their fringe views and past radical leadership, mainstream companies and Democratic politicians stuck with them.

Some corporations and Democratic politicians did so because they didn’t really have a choice. If you didn’t stand with the Radical Left mob, you’d be bullied, protested, boycotted, and hounded. Rather than take a stand and do the right thing, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell did what he almost always does: He showed political cowardice and attended as if their anti-police views didn’t matter. Even then-San Francisco Mayor London Breed did the right thing and over the anti-police positions at her city’s Pride march.

Other corporations and Democratic politicians didn’t mind the fringe views because they agreed with them. In 2022, in light of the group’s anti-police positions. They said they sponsored Seattle Pride because “we support the entire LGBTQ+ community in Seattle” and that the parade is a “celebration of inclusivity and unity.” In other words, at the time, Tito’s Vodka was fine erasing LGBT cops from their “inclusive” pride parade. They went on to try to clarify their .

But…a Seattle media play?

Times, thankfully, have changed.

Corporations no longer have to pretend to care what the Radical Left thinks about anything鈥攑olice, transgender competitions, pretending not to have聽补苍测听gender, racist diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. They’re no longer under a meaningful threat from the activists, not even in Seattle.

But that doesn’t mean some won’t still give in to earn social currency amongst the Seattle activist community.

It seems that a strategy for Seattle Pride is to use far-left news outlets like KING 5 to generate public pressure on corporations to sponsor the parade. It’s a smart strategy in Seattle because Seattle Pride should know local media will never offer the situation an honest look. KING 5, for example, didn’t note the controversies from Seattle Pride. The KING 5 staff are overwhelmingly left-wing and have never seemed to mind the anti-police activism.

The report might generate employees from local corporations to implore their employer to “save” Seattle Pride (even though it doesn’t really need saving and can easily get wealthy left-wing donors to make up for the deficit). It’s not like they’ll get negative press from most Seattle and area media outlets.

Listen to The Jason Rantz Show on weekday afternoons from 3-7 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the聽podcast here. Follow Jason Rantz on聽,听,听, and聽.

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Rantz: After years of pushing fringe political views, Seattle Pride rightly loses sponsorships