Federal appeals court upholds Hamtramck’s ban on Pride flags on city property

Filed 1d ago · Via Michigan Advance · The Buffoon Desk

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Dvorak Polka

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The 6th Circuit upheld Hamtramck's 2023 ban on flying Pride and other group flags from city-owned flagpoles, affirming a lower court's dismissal of a challenge brought by two former city officials.

The court reasoned that even if the poles were once open to private speech, the city could redefine them as government speech and restrict them to a limited list: the American flag, Michigan's flag, and flags of residents' native countries.

The lawsuit followed a 2023 incident in which former commissioners Russ Gordon and Cathy Stackpoole raised a Pride flag in defiance of the new resolution, only to have it removed the same day, prompting protests including from Michigan's gay Attorney General Dana Nessel.

The ban followed the 2021 election of Hamtramck's all-Muslim city council, with then-Mayor Amer Ghalib — later a stalled Trump nominee for ambassador to Kuwait — campaigning explicitly on removing the Pride flag.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Calling a ban that targets one specific flag 'neutral' because it also technically bans flags nobody was flying anyway is the kind of legal reasoning that survives on paper and nowhere else. The court didn't have to pretend the ban was about flagpole tidiness, and it didn't — it just decided the pretense was good enough.

Source: Read the original at Michigan Advance → Scored: Dvorak Polka · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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