The Trump administration was sued Tuesday over the abrupt removal of the Pride rainbow flag last week from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, at the site of the 1969 uprising that ignited the gay rights movement in the United States.
The lawsuit, filed by a group of LGBTQ+ advocates and a Greenwich Village community group, said the federal government claimed that Department of the Interior rules bar the flying of anything but the U.S. flags, DOI flags, and the POW/MIA flags in national parks.
“In fact, the opposite is true: The policies the government says require removing the Pride flag expressly permit the [National Park Service] to fly other flags that provide historical context to national monuments — which is precisely what the NPS official Pride flag did at Stonewall for many years,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan a day after a federal judge in Philadelphia ordered the National Park Service to restore an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park that contained information about the nine slaves who lived with President George Washington in the official presidential residence in Philadelphia in the 1790s.
That order will remain in effect pending the outcome of the city of Philadelphia’s lawsuit challenging the NPS’s removal of the exhibit in January.
