In 2026, officials and activists who adhere to Christian nationalist views and disparage LGBTQ+ people attempted to replace Pride with a holiday of their own and a wave of laws letting Americans refuse service to the LGBTQ+ community. Its reach runs from a proposed federal funding rule down to the banners on small-town light poles.
Key Takeaways
- Robert P. George invented Fidelity Month, the conservative alternative to Pride. Utah and Arkansas declare it by name; similar policies have been adopted in five states. A U.S. Senate resolution put one version on the federal calendar, while George served on the board of the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025.
- Its backers include the lawyers and officials behind the country’s religious-refusal cases. Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner, who won the Supreme Court case letting a wedding website designer refuse same-sex couples, sits on Fidelity Month’s advisory council; Ben Carson, another endorser, vice-chairs Trump’s new Religious Liberty Commission.
- A dozen states already let medical providers refuse LGBTQ+ patients on religious grounds, and the Religious Liberty Commission, due to report July 4, is drafting more such “conscience protections.”
- Federal policy has local reverberations. Florida paved over the Pulse memorial crosswalk, Idaho’s pride flag ban led Boise to wrap its flagpoles in rainbow vinyl, and the federal government removed LGBTQ+ data from its records.
- The same year has brought shuttered clinics, a rising number of murdered trans people, lawsuits from the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal, and a record number of LGBTQ+ Americans seeking to leave the country.
In August 2025, at dawn, a Florida road crew painted over the rainbow crosswalk on Orange Avenue in Orlando. It honored the 49 people a gunman murdered at Pulse, a gay nightclub, on its Latin Night in 2016, the deadliest attack on LGBTQ+ Americans the country has seen. The state gave the city no notice of the landmark’s removal. The work was Florida’s own, done under pressure from Washington, where former reality star and now Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had told governors to remove “distractions” from their roads, and the state warned cities they would lose highway funding if they kept the paint. That afternoon, residents knelt on the asphalt and filled the crosswalk back in with chalk.
The crosswalk was one move in a larger campaign. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says President Trump has singled out transgender people for “discrimination, persecution, and erasure from public life.” The campaign has widened since 2024. In 2026, it arrived with a holiday.
By the Authority of No One
Robert P. George, a Princeton law professor, invented Fidelity Month out of whole cloth. He proclaimed June “Fidelity Month” in 2023, “by the authority vested in me by absolutely no one.” The disclaimer undersold him. He had served on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees since 2019. George’s early Fidelity Month panels included Heritage President Kevin Roberts and Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson, both among its authors.
For two years, the observance lived mostly online. By 2026, it had official backing. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a resolution to recognize June as Fidelity Month on the federal calendar. It credited George and the Heritage Foundation-linked Ethics and Public Policy Center. Lawmakers in at least four states filed similar bills. Kentucky’s Senate adopted one in March, and Michigan’s House did the same in June. Across the country, Republican governors were renaming the month for something other than Pride: Fidelity Month in Utah and Arkansas, Nuclear Family Month in Indiana, Strong Families Month in Alabama, and Life Month in Oklahoma. Tennessee had moved first in April, when Gov. Bill Lee signed a Nuclear Family Month resolution into law. Of that group, only Utah’s Spencer Cox had ever recognized Pride at all. Roberts told the Associated Press the alternatives were welcome because Pride had made it “difficult to celebrate traditional marriage.” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders released her proclamation through a Daily Wire article headlined “Counter-Programming Pride Month.”
On the second day of Pride Month, the official account of Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted, “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.” The sign-off named the resolution his governor had signed. Under bipartisan criticism, Ogles deleted the post and blamed a staffer.
Pastors and conservative outlets have pushed Fidelity Month and its imitators as Pride’s replacement. The name invokes faithful marriage, oblivious to studies that show same-sex couples divorce at lower rates than heterosexual ones.
The Texas Rangers will skip Pride Night again this season, the only one of 30 major-league teams that has never held one. On June 18, they will host a Faith and Family Night instead, when players talk about their religious beliefs.
Fidelity Month’s advisory council includes Kristen Waggoner, who leads Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-LGBTQ+ legal organization that has argued case after case before the Supreme Court, and Ben Carson, founder of the American Cornerstone Institute, a Project 2025 supporter and faith-based conservative think tank. The Catholic League, the Colson Center and several state family-policy councils round out the partner list, and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins endorsed the governors’ proclamations. George resigned from the Heritage board in November 2025, after Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes.
George describes Fidelity Month as a grassroots movement with no staff and no budget. Its 2026 kickoff seated him in a webinar alongside Ben Carson and two fellows of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Project 2025 advisory board member; a volunteer from the Witherspoon Institute, a religious-conservative think tank George founded, runs the daily work. At a Fidelity Month event in Washington, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Carson took the stage. The operation sells branded merchandise and hands legislators and city councils ready-made resolutions to adopt.
Family and government are two of the seven. The Seven Mountain Mandate calls for taking control of the institutions Christian nationalists consider decisive.
George presents Fidelity Month as ecumenical, open to every race and faith, and he warns against antisemitism creeping in under the banner of religion. The month’s proclamations and the laws beside it land squarely on LGBTQ+ people.
The rebrand reflects the men running the government. In his inaugural address, Trump pledged to end what he called the government’s effort to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that “our diversity is not our strength,” and at West Point in May he dismissed transgender troops and told cadets the military’s call is “send us, not send he, not send she, not send they/them.”
A License to Refuse
Beside the proclamations sits a growing body of law that recasts religious liberty as a right to refuse service. A clinic can turn away a transgender patient on religious grounds.
The exemptions are already everywhere. Since the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, conservative lawyers have written carve-outs broad enough to cover whole categories of work. A dozen states let medical providers refuse LGBTQ+ patients, the Movement Advancement Project counts, and several let taxpayer-funded adoption agencies turn away same-sex couples. Florida went further: its 2023 law, Senate Bill 1580, clears doctors, nurses and insurers to refuse care over religious, moral or ethical objections.
None of this began with Trump. The Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby ruling gave a private company a religious exemption from federal law, and most LGBTQ+ Americans now live in a state with a religious-exemption law on the books.
One outfit keeps turning up at the Court: ADF. In 2023, Waggoner argued and won 303 Creative v. Elenis. The justices ruled that a Colorado web designer had a First Amendment right to refuse same-sex wedding clients. The dissent noted that it was the first time the Court had allowed a publicly open business to turn away a protected class. ADF brought Masterpiece Cakeshop in 2018, and in 2021 the Court separately let a Catholic foster agency in Philadelphia reject same-sex couples.
The administration is carrying out the religious-liberty agenda Project 2025 set out. It has moved to protect faith-based adoption agencies that turn away same-sex parents. On May 1, 2025, Trump signed the Religious Liberty Commission into being and told it to strengthen “conscience protections in the health care field.” He put Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in charge, with Carson as vice chair. Its report is due July 4, 2026.
Within health agencies, the administration is restoring the conscience rule that allows clinicians to refuse procedures they object to on religious grounds. The same effort would rebuild the Department of Health and Human Services into what Project 2025 called a “Department of Life.”
Scraping Off the Rainbow
Duffy’s July 2025 order called rainbow crosswalks a traffic hazard. NHTSA, the safety agency inside Duffy’s own department, recorded 39,345 road deaths in 2024, a 3.8 percent drop from the year before. In Dallas, the LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce had funded the crosswalks, and the city tore them out at public expense after Gov. Greg Abbott ordered Texas roads cleared of “political ideologies.”
Florida directed cities to strip more than 400 other roadway markings. After one bridge lost its rainbow lighting, supporters lit it with flashlights.
State flag bans set off another round of defiance. Utah became the first state to prohibit “unofficial” flags on public buildings, with a $500 daily fine that its sponsor admitted targeted the Pride flag. Salt Lake City responded by adopting the rainbow, transgender, and Juneteenth flags as official city flags, each marked with the city’s sego lily, putting them beyond the ban. Boise did the same under Idaho’s law, and Idaho tightened the statute with a $2,000 daily fine. Boise then wrapped its three City Hall flagpoles in rainbow vinyl, on the theory that a colored pole is not a flag. The ban’s sponsor said the poles complied, and they remain up.
In Wenatchee, Washington, the city flies banners on public light poles for nonprofits that apply, on a first-come, first-served basis. Keyton Lawter used that rule to claim June for banners celebrating the family, which the Christian-nationalist Freedom Con website billed as a replacement for Pride. That leaves local LGBTQ+ groups to settle for another month or go without. In neighboring East Wenatchee, the City Council voted in March to end Pride banners and limit displays to city-sponsored events.
The administration stripped gender identity from federal data collection. At agency after agency, officials deleted LGBTQ+ references from public health research.
In Texas, a law known as Senate Bill 12 took effect this school year. It requires teachers to use the names on students’ birth certificates. They must report any request for a different name or pronouns to parents, and Pride flags must come down. The Katy Independent School District pulled 142 LGBTQ+-themed books in the first month of 2026, part of hundreds it has removed or made inaccessible since 2022, among them Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper and the transgender memoir Being Jazz.
In D’Iberville, Mississippi, Jonas Hole graduated second in his class. He is transmasculine, a decorated cadet in the Army’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Days before the ceremony, his school posted a Facebook tribute that used his old name and, supporters said, edited the mustache off his cadet portrait to make him look more feminine. Six other transgender seniors had already lost their yearbook photos, dropped for wearing a tux. At graduation, the principal introduced him as “an outstanding young lady” and handed him a diploma bearing the name he had left behind. He gave the salutatory address anyway, and told his classmates to be themselves, no matter who tried to stop them.
The Rule Built to Last
The most far-reaching measure is a proposed regulation. On May 29, 2026, the Office of Management and Budget, headed by Project 2025 author Russell Vought, proposed a 400-page rule that would condition nearly all federal funding on rejecting what it calls “gender ideology,” a standard grantmaking agencies across the government would have to enforce. A finished rule is harder to reverse than an executive order, so this one would likely outlast the administration that wrote it.
The rule requires a pre-issuance review. Before any grant goes out, a political appointee would screen the applicant for any sign that it treats sex as “a chosen or mutable characteristic.” It cuts out the career scientists and peer-review panels who once made that call. The review covers the whole institution, including its health plans and name-change policies. A hospital, university, homeless shelter, or state agency that recognizes transgender people could lose its federal funding. The rule’s explicit ban on transition care stops at age 19. Its broader ban on “gender ideology” carries no such cutoff and reaches across an entire institution, so a hospital that treats transgender adults could still lose its funding. It also removes the grants framework’s reference to Bostock, the 2020 ruling that barred sex discrimination against transgender workers.
Some organizations are folding before the rule is even final. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children purged transgender references from its materials after the Justice Department pressured the group over its funding and told it to list missing transgender children under their birth names, which makes those children harder to find. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, the largest anti-sexual-violence organization in the country, removed its resources for LGBTQ+ survivors. The same logic governs money leaving the country: the State Department has tied gender-ideology and DEI conditions to more than $40 billion in foreign aid. Public comment on Vought’s proposed rule closes July 13, and the administration wants it final by October.
The Cost in Lives
The medical-news outlet STAT counts more than 40 hospitals that have stopped providing gender-affirming care since Trump’s January 2025 order branded it “chemical and surgical mutilation.” After a federal judge struck down the policy, Wisconsin’s largest health systems still withheld care; in New York, the attorney general had to order NYU Langone to resume treating patients. Lambda Legal, the ACLU and PFLAG sued and called the order “patently unlawful,” while the Supreme Court last year upheld Tennessee’s ban on care for trans minors.
In July 2025, the Justice Department issued more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that treat transgender minors. This May, a grand jury subpoenaed NYU Langone for far more — the file of every patient under 18 treated for gender dysphoria since 2020, and the names of the clinicians who saw them. Several hospitals have refused. A federal judge in California quashed a subpoena against a children’s hospital. Then came the phone calls. Parents at Mount Sinai say the hospital called to tell them their children’s medical records were on their way to the government.
Gallup now puts support for same-sex marriage at 65 percent, down from 71 percent in 2022, with Republican backing sliding from 55 to 37.
The state is not the only actor. At Athens PrideFest in Georgia on June 6, about 10 men in matching red and black marched up the parade route behind a swastika flag and gave Nazi salutes. Some shouted “Heil Hitler.” They were the Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group that has shown up at Pride and drag events since 2023. The crowd booed and closed ranks. Organizers carried a banner in front of the men to block them, and the men left.
The killings have not stopped. Juniper Blessing was 19, a sophomore at the University of Washington who had moved up from Santa Fe to study atmospheric science, with minors in music and philosophy. Her voice teacher called her singing magnificent, at home in a Mozart aria or a Disney song. Blessing wanted to study hurricanes. She was applying for a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration internship in Houston or Miami, cities in states that had passed anti-transgender laws, and she asked her teacher to put her old name on the recommendation. On May 10, a man stabbed her more than 40 times in the laundry room of her apartment building. Washington’s state LGBTQ+ commission logged her as the seventh transgender person murdered in the country this year. Another, a 29-year-old her friends knew as “Mommie Spotsie King,” turned up shot in rural Florida; police booked her under her birth name. The Human Rights Campaign counted at least 27 such killings in its most recent annual report, and found Black transgender women killed most often.
Bigger Than Pride
Laverne Cox was the first trans woman on the cover of TIME. The magazine called her 2014 cover a transgender tipping point. The years since have run the other way. She says the country is now bent on dehumanizing trans people, and that her work is to “rehumanize trans people and rehumanize everybody.”
The targets reach well past LGBTQ+ people. Project 2025, the blueprint behind much of it, is grounded in Christian nationalism, and it sorts the country into people who belong and people who do not. Transgender people fall outside the line: one Heritage-linked plan would have the Federal Bureau of Investigation treat them as domestic terrorists. So do immigrants, and the racial and religious minorities whose federal programs the administration is gutting.
The model travels, too. In Russia, Argentina and beyond, allied governments roll back LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights along the same lines.
At home, the country that once took in persecuted LGBTQ+ people has become one they leave. On his first day back in office, Trump suspended the refugee program that Rainbow Railroad, a nonprofit that helps LGBTQ+ people reach safety, had used to resettle them. Dozens of approved applicants are now bound for Canada instead. The group now fields more requests for help from the United States than from anywhere else, about two-thirds of them from transgender people. TIME profiled one family, the Trujillos, who left instead of raising a transgender child under the new rules. “Up until now,” Steve Roth of the Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration told the magazine, “the move has been ‘Come to the U.S. It’s safe and welcoming.’” No more.
