Banning Pride Parades Is Not a Big Deal If It Happens in California

Imagine a group of individuals. All they want to do is have a big event to celebrate their sexual identity. Then, the local government, citing some dubious public safety concerns, puts the kibosh on the whole thing, stopping the group from exercising their free expression rights.

When and where could such an injustice be allowed to happen? The answer is: in Modesto, California, in August 2019.

That’s right, in 2019, in one of the most liberal states in the US, city officials denied a permit for a pride parade. The twist is, it was actually a straight pride parade, as opposed to the other marches of this sort that typically celebrate homosexuality. Accordingly, coverage of its permit being denied was completely different from that of the Budapest Pride parade restricted in Hungary in 2025.

Back in 2019, headlines about the straight pride parade being banned focused on the concerns of the LGBT community about the event. The city council cited a lack of insurance, as well as ‘concern for the safety of the residents’ for denying the event’s permit, which was pretty much taken at face value by the press. An unspoken ideological motive, or God forbid, prejudice against a sexual group, was never even hinted at in mainstream news reports.

In juxtaposition, when the Hungarian National Assembly adopted a bill that banned Budapest Pride on the grounds of protecting children, mainstream press in the West did not hesitate to run wild with speculations about the new law’s incendiary motives and its ideological implications.

Predictably, the liberal members in the European Parliament joined in the hysterics. At a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, in May 2025, they demanded that the European Commission step in and overturn the Pride ban passed by the sovereign legislative body of Hungary.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has implemented similar measures. In 2023, following the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, the Hungarian government banned pro-Palestine, terrorist-sympathiser protests. Hungary was the only country to put such a restriction in place, and was widely celebrated for that by the international Jewish community.

Back in the US in 2019, press reports were more focused on digging up dirt on the organizers of the straight pride parade in Modesto. Through their insightful reporting, we got to learn that they have ‘alt-right connections,’ and we sure as hell got to read a lot about a joke one of the organizers made, calling themselves ‘a very peaceful racist group’.

On the other side of the US, in Boston, Massachusetts, people did manage to actually get a straight pride parade on the streets that year. There, the city actually granted them the permit for the event, but only after the then-Mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, gave a lengthy explanation why he did not have the authority to deny the permit to calm the LGBT activists peddling for a ban. The Boston straight pride parade was put on by the ‘dangerous alt-right group’ called Super Happy Fun America.

In that regard, that case is very similar to that of the 2025 Budapest Pride. Despite the political squabble, the parade will go on. It will be taking place on 28 June, thanks to another liberal mayor, Mayor Gergely Karácsony of Budapest.

He and the municipal government of Budapest took it upon themselves to organize the ‘Budapest Büszkeség’ event, which is just a word-for-word translation of Budapest Pride.

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