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First Santa, Now Drag Queens: Macy’s Celebrates “Pride” Month

Macy’s was once a symbol of wholesome American fun with its Thanksgiving Parades and visits with Santa Claus, immortalized years ago in the classic movie Miracle on 34th Street. But this month the department store chain is busy promoting the debauchery associated with “LGBT pride” and pushing the new all-American tradition of encouraging children to interact with perverted drag queens.

Macy’s has been promoting “LGBT” activism for a while, undeterred by periodic protests from pro-family groups. This is the 10th year for the chain’s annual “Pride + Joy” campaign and its June festivities for “Pride Month” are now on a scale similar to that of patriotic and holiday celebrations. With flags of its own, the “LGBT” movement has rapidly gained ground in the mainstream, thanks in no small part to the growing number of corporate and civic allies eager to outdo each other in the race to see who can be the most ingratiating toward the queer lobby. Apparently not wanting to be left behind by Target or any other store, Macy’s created a full calendar of special events for this month.

On Saturday, June 22, the flagship store in New York City in Herald Square will host a Drag Queen Story Hour. “Bring the whole family for a reading circle and sing along with the queens at this feel-good event!” reads the calendar posting. Macy’s on State Street in downtown Chicago will hold a “Pride” celebration this coming Saturday, June 15, to “celebrate family, friends and community” and offer “treats, performances by drag queens and more!”

Macy’s stores in Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, Minnesota, and Columbus, Ohio, are also holding “Pride” events this month. The chain is participating in “Pride” parades and festivals across the county and selling “Pride”-themed merchandise at more than 150 stores and online at macys.com. The New York City location earlier this month had a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new “Pride” shop within the department store. Macy’s boasts that the Manhattan store is “beaming with Pride as it lights up the night in rainbow colors every evening in June.”

This past November, “LGBT” activists celebrated when the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade featured a same-sex kiss between two actresses participating in the parade. Not everyone saw it as a sign of progress. “Macy’s has sexualized and lesbianized Thanksgiving in its iconic kids’ parade,” wrote conservative writer Rod Dreher.

Other once family-friendly companies are also stepping up efforts to push the “LGBT” agenda, including Disney, which held its first “Pride” parade at its theme park in Paris on June 1. In writing about the parade, the “LGBT” publication Out Magazine called Mickey and Minnie Mouse allies and described them sporting “brand new Pride looks, riding by in a car covered in rainbows.” For years, Disney has held unofficial gay events at its theme parks.

As “Pride” events have grown in size and begun touting themselves as family-friendly—making them even more vile—Christians have become more befuddled about how to react. It should be obvious to Christians that they shouldn’t join in the festivities, but some need reminders like that found in Dr. Michael Brown‘s recent piece, “Why I Do Not Celebrate Gay Pride.”

Even worse, some supposedly conservative Christians publicly endorse attending “Pride” events. In evangelical Protestant and Catholic circles, there’s a growing “gay but celibate” movement that encourages Christians with homosexual attractions to openly and unashamedly identify as gay and which allows for keeping one foot in the gay world so long as one does not act on same-sex desires. Last year, lesbian Catholic writer and Revoice conference speaker Eve Tushnet wrote in Patheos:

I was at the Pride parade this weekend. I have all kinds of issues with contemporary Pride celebrations but here is the thing: I know Christians, believers seeking to live obediently, who feel freed at Pride in a way they never feel in church. In so many of our churches, gay people’s shame is treated as a proof of their orthodoxy or personal holiness… I don’t feel especially liberated by Pride, but that is because I was never imprisoned in the ways that my friends have been. I’m always aware of the ways in which my faith makes me an outsider there. But my friends, who share my faith in spite of much greater suffering at the hands of Christians, feel liberated at Pride because it is a place where being gay does not separate you from others, but connects you to them. Being in a space where everyone is gay and just rejoicing in our community, flinging beads (I do love the beads), being gay in a million different ways, makes you see that being gay can mean community instead of silence, solidarity instead of judgment, beauty instead of barrenness, welcome instead of suspicion, and joy instead of despair.

Department stores bedecking “LGBT” depravity with rainbows and glitter and selling it to kids as well as adults deserve to feel the heat of righteous anger. But when Christians get this confused and compromised, they’re a lot less likely to send the right message.



IFI Banquet Speaker Announced!
We are excited to announce that at this year’s IFI banquet, our keynote speaker will be none other than Rev. Franklin Graham, President & CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christian evangelist & missionary. This year’s event will be at the Tinley Park Convention Center on Nov. 1st.

Learn more HERE.

 




Planned Parenthood Losing Some Big Donors

Last year at this time, 2ndVote scored Macy’s low partly because of its practice of donating to Planned Parenthood and matching donations from its employees – but 2ndVote spokesperson Robert Kuykendall has an update.

“Macy’s reached out to 2ndVote and told us that the company is no longer donating any kind of money to Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest provider of abortion,” he explains.

downward trend in businessSince 2ndVote started scoring corporations, AT&T, Coca Cola, Ford, and Xerox also stopped funding the abortion conglomerate – and Kuykendall says that’s largely due to exposing the companies’ practices and urging consumers to apply pressure. But there’s more work to be done, he says.

“If you’re doing business with American Express, with Allstate, with Patagonia especially – Patagonia gives tens of thousands of dollars to Planned Parenthood every year – a portion of your dollars is going to the largest provider of abortion services,” he informs. “So we want people to be informed; and secondly, we want people to engage those companies.”

And that, he says, is by consumers voicing their concerns to the companies and spending their money elsewhere. That’s what 2ndVote is all about – the first vote is in an election, and the second vote is taking consumer spending away from offending corporations.

Read more about 2nd Vote HERE.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to urge your U.S. Representative to defund Planned Parenthood.


This article was originally posted at OneNewsNow.com




Macy’s Walks Onto the Naughty List with Kinky Boots

Correction: Macy’s has stated that it was the victim of a “prank” that involved a flyer falsely advertising an event involving Santa in “kinky boots” to be held at the State Street store in Chicago. IFI regrets including a discussion (since removed) of that flyer in this article about the troubling Kinky Boots performance in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

Like many Americans, you probably spent Thanksgiving Day at home with your family engaged in any number of family traditions, including watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.  So, did you enjoy the drag queens in “kinky boots” during the parade? For those who didn’t see the parade, take a few moments to watch this video clip of this controversial parade performance.

Macy’s invited the cast of the musical Kinky Boots to be part of their parade this year, apparently thinking the world needs to see kinky drag queens dancing in their boots in order to fully grasp what equality, tolerance, and Thanksgiving are all about.

The show centers around a drag queen who helps turn a shoe factory around with, you guessed it, kinky boots. In case you’re unfamiliar with this award-winning musical, you can click here to learn more. 

The musical has limited family appeal as most parents don’t want to take their children to see drag queens, so it was both curious and controversial when Macy’s invited the cast to take part in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Surely Macy’s management knew there would be many young children watching live and from home. Did Macy’s management care that exposure to drag queens would compel parents to talk to their children about a topic that many consider age-inappropriate? It’s one thing to put gender confusion on display for adults who at least have enough experience to understand what they’re seeing. It’s another thing to expose children to this confusion,  many of whom will have questions about why men are dressed as women.Is there no musical that Macy’s could find to illuminate the message of and spirit of Thanksgiving other than one that celebrates a behavior that God condemns (ie., cross-dressing)?

As with sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality, this effort is not about promoting tolerance of people. It’s about exploiting the concept of tolerance in order to expose children to the perverse sexual activities of adults in an effort to normalize such perversion.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade also serves to inaugurate the Christmas season with an appearance by Santa Claus. Macy’s is willing to profit from the day set aside to celebrate the birth of Christ, while blaspheming God and insulting the beliefs of those whose hard-earned money they want. The hard-earned money of Christians is being used by Macy’s to normalize gender confusion and cross-dressing and to insult our God — who will not be mocked.

This is bad business and bad policy on the part of Macy’s. They are pushing mature adult conversations about psychological and moral issues on families at a time when families want to focus on celebrating Thanksgiving and the advent of the Christmas season.

Take ACTION:  Please click HERE to send an email or a fax to Macy’s President and CEO Terry J. Lundgren.  Let him know what you think of their decision to include a Kinky Boots performance in the Thanksgiving Day parade, then shop elsewhere.  You can also call their customer relations number at (513) 570-7000. 

It’s always offensive to push corrosive social and sexual agendas on children, but doing so during celebrations of religious holidays may be most offensive time of all.

Additional Contact Information:

Terry J. Lundgren, President 
Macy’s 
7 West Seventh Street
Cincinnati, OH  45202 
Phone: 513-579-7000
or: 513-579-7764
Fax: 513-579-7555


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