Nice try, Pride. But it’s time for your

board of directors to resign. You have continually covered up your mistakes and lied to the very people you claim to serve.

If you missed it, Pride’s apology at the Spirit of Stonewall rally Friday night was eloquent, but vague. Unless you knew about the drama that took place last week, you wouldn’t have known what they were talking about; only that they had “misjudged” the community’s concerns when they tried to respect “civil rights, equal rights and individual rights” and not succumb to “gay baiting.”

But it was too little too late.

It didn’t seem important for Pride to mention – in their press release issued last week or at Friday’s rally – that the resignation of full-time logistics coordinator Jerry Garrett wasn’t actually effective until 12:00 noon the day after their apology at the rally (see news story, page 14). Which means that while Pride was reading their “apology” at the Stonewall rally, and all the politicians were cheering their call to “let the healing begin,” Garrett was actually still on staff, and everyone on the Pride board knew it. And when the same politicians, officials and community groups they had just misled were waving at the crowd during the parade on Saturday morning, Garrett was working on the festival grounds until “about an hour” after his official 12:00 noon resignation. How does this in any way differ from the bulk of his normal duties as logistics coordinator? They were duped.

The fact that the annually approved City Council resolution in honor of Pride was pulled from the docket is another example of Pride’s dishonesty. City Hall officials gave Pride an ultimatum: dismiss all known sex offenders or the Pride resolution would get pulled from the docket. Pride met, voted again to retain the men, and let the resolution slide, giving another vague explanation that they were too busy to send someone down to the City Council meeting to present the resolution for approval. It would have been the first time in our city’s history that an openly gay acting mayor presented the proclamation to Pride, but that loss pales in comparison to the insulting manner in which Pride withheld information from the public.

In the week leading up to Pride, the board voted four times to retain Daniel Rieger, Ric Derichsweiler and Jerry Garrett before they finally issued a press release announcing that the men in question had resigned and that the board planned to develop new screening policies. But they only referenced two, knowing that most of the community and the mainstream media were only aware of Rieger and Derichsweiler.

Was the initial media storm on the issue an attempt by the radical right to undercut Pride and our community? Yes, of course it was. But that quickly became irrelevant.

In none of these four child molesters’ cases was it a matter of an 18-year-old committing “lewd or lascivious acts” or oral copulation with a 17-year-old, Megan’s Law forever damning them with blind injustice. In all four cases, these were men at the very least in their late 20s or early 30s having sexual contact with boys under the age of 16, and in Derichsweiler’s case, it was sexual contact with a child under 14 years old “with force.”

Pride’s assertion that their conflict was between protecting the men’s civil rights and addressing our community’s concerns demonstrates a level of incompetent judgment that is flabbergasting. True, Pride was not technically violating Megan’s Law by having the men on the team, but digging their heels in and refusing to dismiss them after our own GLBT family associations and sexual-abuse survivor groups expressed major concern for the safety and comfort of their own children – and themselves – is horrifyingly stubborn. To then let Garrett work an hour into the festival after they’d assured everyone that he would be gone shows that Pride didn’t take their concerns seriously at all. What a smack in the face.

A few people have said our history of society labeling us as “perverts” clouded our community’s judgment, and that Pride bowing to pressure is an example of picket fencing to gain mainstream acceptance. But this isn’t a case of being lumped in with perverts, or of picket fencing. This is child molestation, and that is why parenting organizations, sexual-abuse survivors, law enforcement officials and many other Pride participants were so concerned about the men’s presence in the organization. Where do concerns of the men’s civil rights come into the argument at all?

Board members Joe Mayer and Debra Self are stepping down at the end of August, and the rest need to follow suit. It’s time for a group of true leaders to take over an organization bereft of integrity that has betrayed our trust.