Few recognize that these “gay pride” parades are, literally, celebrations of martial power in the tradition of conquering armies flaunting plunder taken from defeated foes. Not kinetic wars but cultural ones: not captured armor and artifacts but captured people and their cultural symbolism. The floats and finery of these processions accentuate a cavalcade of cultural appropriations: the trans appropriation of the emblems of femininity and feminism, the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” appropriation of Catholic imagery, the “welcoming and affirming” contingents of pseudo-Christians’ appropriation of Protestant imagery, etc. – and above all of them flies the rainbow flag, stolen in the 1980s from the Black Panthers and Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition.” Each contingent of Boy Scouts, soldiers and sailors, cops, civil servants, business and community groups represent the conquest of a former secular foe to the LGBT agenda being marched, hook-jawed like the Assyrian captives of old before cow-eyed masses awed by “gay” supremacy.