Our town recently celebrated its second annual PRIDE Festival.

It was, by all accounts, a joy-filled, loving celebration of our diverse community, marred only by the presence of a group of professed Christians who attended with the sole intention of making people feel unwelcome, unloved, and unsafe, and I wrote as much here.

A couple of days later, I was in the grocery checkout line when a man behind me said, “Excuse me, are you John Pavlovitz?”I recognized him immediately.”I am,“ I responded.”I follow you on Twitter”, he said. ”Awesome,” I replied, shaking his hand.”

He continued. “I was at Pride the other day. I was on the other side.””I know you were." I said, smiling.He asked me if he could talk to me for a minute, and I obliged, pulling my cart to the side of the store’s entrance.The first words out of his mouth were, “So, let me ask you, do you want to make enemies or do you want to have a conversation?”

(The low-key threats were just beginning.)

“That’s funny,” I replied. “You all came screaming through bullhorns, waving signs about eternal damnation, and invading people’s personal space. Just what about that invited conversation? Do you really think anyone there felt seen and respected by you?”

I pressed him further…

“Our faith calls us to love our neighbors. You were there in that space, surrounded by thousands of your neighbors, and instead of taking the time to actually meet them and hear their stories, you shouted and waved signs and sang religious songs in their ears. You refused to emulate Jesus, and you want to pretend they rejected him, but they understandably rejected you.”He quickly pivoted, something that would prove to be a pattern.He said, ”You wrote in your article that the police presence was required because of us, but that wasn’t true,” seemingly annoyed at my mischaracterization.”It wasn’t because of you?” I asked. “So, why were they there, to make sure the thousands of rainbow-clad, face-painted, woke liberals coming together to celebrate life were too happy?”

Before he could answer, I suggested that he and his church friends had come to that public event with the singular intention of intimidating people, and he bristled.”To disrupt, yes, but not intimidate,” he responded, without a whiff of irony.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the audacity.

“That’s a nice game of semantics you got there. So tell me, to a transgender teenager or a gay couple who’ve always been on the receiving end of harassment and violence by Christians, what’s the difference between disruption and intimidation?””Trust me,” he said matter-of-factly. “If we wanted to intimidate, we could have.”

(More threats.)”Ah,” I replied with a good deal of sarcasm, “that sounds just like Jesus.”I continued, “So, you just admitted that you came to that event (one you could have avoided) intending to disrupt it?” He agreed.

“So, the police were required to prevent you from disrupting it.”He pivoted again, talking about the ways I supposedly misrepresented his group in my piece.

“You just really need to be careful about what you write and say about us.” he warned.”No,” I replied. “You need to be careful you don’t do things in public places that you don’t want to be held responsible for.”

He then began to parrot the party line of the LGBTQ’s supposed threat to children. When I offered to show him the video on my phone of one of his collaborators approaching a stranger’s young child (something they had been expressly forbidden to do) he actually defended it. “Hey, if we’re trying to save kids, we’re gonna do that.””John,” he continued, “Let’s agree that we both want to indoctrinate children.”I replied, ”Um, no, I’m not agreeing to that. I want children to believe all people deserve to be the fullest expression of who they are. You want them to grow up hating themselves or fearing other people.”He then began to lob all kinds of talking points about the supposed perversion of the queer community, about child abuse, about the Bible, and I could see he really wasn’t listening anymore.

I then made the mistake of asking a terribly offensive question:”Look, what’s your name?” I said, hoping to reach him on a level deeper than theological issues. He stopped abruptly and said dismissively. “I’m not giving you my name.””Just your first name.” I said, “I’m trying to approach you like a human being.”He refused, saying that I was a divisive, troublemaking public figure and he was afraid I would doxx him on social media.I said, ”First of all, I wouldn’t share your name, but second of all, this shows me that you’re ashamed of what you did on Saturday. You know it wasn’t above board or decent or loving, otherwise you’d have no issue claiming it.””You are a public figure,” he said. “I’m not.”

“Do you know why I’m a public figure? I asked him. “Because I take ownership of the things and I say and write and the stuff I do in public gatherings. The fact that you won’t tells me all I need to know.”

I asked him about Jesus’ call to care for the vulnerable, the overlooked; those he called the least of these. I asked him where the love and compassion of Jesus were in. their presence or their purpose at PRIDE.He pivoted once last time, boasting of how organized he and his compatriots were and assuring me of their commitment to continue pestering strangers in the name of a God of love. ”We’re not gonna allow this filth in our community,” he said grimly, “And we’re only gonna get bigger and bigger and louder and louder.””Ah,” I replied, “again, with the threats.”

I assured him that just as our PRIDE event was substantially larger this year, so is the movement of compassionate, loving, good hearted people here, who are exhausted by bigotry cloaked in Christian love, people who know that intimidation isn’t the work Jesus called us to do.

He halfheartedly thanked me for the time, but soon yelled from his car, “You’re gonna be held accountable by God one day, John!””I smiled and said, “You’re gonna be held accountable by me tomorrow on social media, whatever your name is.”

Friends, I share this exchange with you so that you understand how serious a threat these people are to the communities we call home. They aren’t just seeking to eradicate the queer community, but immigrants, Muslims, people of color, and anyone not fitting the very narrow demographic they represent. They are organized, emboldened, and committed to making every town and city in the nation one where people are not free to express themselves, where they are not able to feel comfortable in their own skin in their own homes.

It’s critical that we all are vocal and visible in supporting diversity, that we risk discomfort on behalf of vulnerable members of our communities, and so that those seeking to intimidate people into silence or to render them invisible, do not succeed.

Here’s another account of our town’s PRIDE event, and a deep dive into the intentions and tactics of protestors, which are happening everywhere….

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