Bradley Manning: Just Happens To Be...

"He has done nothing for the LGBT community, which is the criteria for a grand marshal. He just happens to be gay, which is not sufficient."

Zoe Dunning, a retired Navy commander and LGBT campaigner, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. 

"I got news: the gay community is part of the larger human community. So, when someone does something that exposes the US military’s crimes, that may embarrass the US, but this is stuff Americans should know and the world should know. To me that benefits gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and I don’t buy this argument that he’s done nothing for the gay community because we have this narrow definition of what that means. It’s ridiculous.
“The idea that a gay person who does a heroic act that benefits humanity should not be a Grand Marshal for Pride is reprehensible.”

Joey Cain, who nominated Bradley Manning to be a Grand Marshal at San Francisco Pride, on that honours withdrawal in The Dissenter.

“Our message to SF Pride is that they should make Manning a Grand Marshal of this year’s Pride March and Celebration because of his brave act of whistleblowing against the military industrial complex.
“We are fed up with marriage and military concerns sucking the oxygen out of what used to be a queer movement and Pride March and Celebration about social justice for queers.” 
“He’s an antiwar hero, a whistleblower who is gay. 
"He was lipsynching to Lady Gaga while downloading classified documents. It doesn’t get more gay than that.”

Statements by organisers of a protest outside SF Pride's office on Monday.

PS Scott Long remembers SF Pride's previous support for US imperial ambitions with an officially sanctioned float bearing a giant papier-mache model of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, being anally raped by a nuclear missile being rode by a leatherman.
This, of course, was not thought controversial.
Hooray for hegemony!
When do we start gay bombing?

Update: "Hopefully, in the same way the police’s attempt to silence a bunch of queers in a Greenwich Village bar four decades ago backfired, perhaps the attempt to further silence Private Manning will backfire, as well." Steven Thrasher on Gawker.