Right to assemble: City of Naples may review permit process after Pride Fest at Cambier

The terms are heavily loaded: "Grooming." "Gender dysphoria." "Family values."  "Lifestyle." The commentary is by turns plaintive and demanding. And all of it is becoming an expected segment of the public comment time at Naples City Council meetings.

As the presence of the LGBTQ+ community in Collier County has become more visible, a conservative antagonism to it has become more vocal, accusatory and, rarely, threatening. One social media comment after the Naples City Council on Monday, Aug. 15, turned ominous:

"We don’t want these leftest (sic) holding drag anything in collier county. Do not allow or encourage this behavior or we the people will show up for their next gathering and you don’t have enough law enforcement to control what goes down"

Right now, however, nearly all salvos are verbal, often delivered with signs carried by protesters wearing red, white and blue. The Aug. 15 council appearance was the latest. A knot of complainants gathered around city hall, ostensibly to demand the city ban drag shows, which were part of the entertainment for the fourth annual Naples Pride Fest on July 9 in Cambier Park.

But their posters reflected a larger picture of purported offenses. Several banners declared "WE WILL NOT ACCEPT" in large type, with the claims underneath: grooming; gender confusion; and sex clubs, specifically GLSEN, a support organization for LGBTQ+ youth. All those are in addition to the drag queen show being targeted.

LGBTQ+ complainants organize

Their demands marked at least a third public attempt this year to disrupt or eliminate LGBTQ+ events in the county.

• Demonstrators showed up at a May 21 workshop at Naples United Church of Christ for young teens sponsored by GLSEN Collier, the support network fo LGBTQ+ youth. Before the workshop, critics also petitioned Collier County Public Schools to not allow its locations as pickup points for youths attending the workshop. As it turned out, the pickups were being made on public property, and were using the school names as reference points.

Chris Schmeckpeper-Kobzina, cochair of GLSEN Collier, remembers protesters driving by the event — and being told to leave by Naples police: "We had really good coverage by the Naples police. They kept everybody away from the students."

• Members of the group that appeared Monday appeared July 26 at the Collier Board of County Commissioners with the same request. It was unclear whether they were trying to pre-emptively eliminate them or had simply mistaken the county as the jurisdiction that permits events such as Pride Fest. Commissioner Penny Taylor did point out to the group that only the city had authority over Cambier Park.

Yet another development has set gay supporters on edge. Lifesite, an ultraconservative web site that packages Roman Catholic commentary and political advocacy stories, chose to hold its 25th anniversary gala at Naples Grande Beach Resort on Wednesday, Aug. 17.

Help for teens: LGBTQ+ Sage House to be safe place, counseling center for kids, even parents, in trauma

AND: LGBTQ+ event for teens Saturday at Naples church drawing worldwide attention

"We have a lot of supporters in Naples," said Steve Jalsevac, cofounder of the Canadian-based Lifesite.

Lifesite made waves in 2018 with an article critical of the Diocese of San Diego for employing a gay married man as a parish administrator; its story even carried a sentence asking readers to sign a linked petition demanding his dismissal. (The man eventually resigned after his church suffered vandalism and threats.)

The organization has been permanently banned from Facebook, albeit for another stated reason: spreading false information about COVID-19.

"Our approach is not a hostile one. It never has been hostile," Jalsevac said. "It's one to report for the betterment of each person who may be involved in that issue, or has been involved in that lifestyle."

He called the article a "no brainer" in advocating for the administrator's dismissal in that he was "actually acting contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church, which is 2,000 years old. Why would (the San Diego administrator) be involved in a Catholic ministry at all when he's advocating something that is fundamentally opposed to the teachings of the church?"

Drag show bans only the first step, some say

And at the Naples City Council workshop, several speakers who said they came from groups like GAP (Great American Patriots) and Southwest Florida Christian Activists indicated dropping the drag show at the Pride festival will not end their complaints.

"This isn't coming from a place of hate," said Teddy Collins, who spoke to the Daily News with GAPStand representative Tim Carpenter after the City Council meeting.

75-plus things to do in August: Laugh with comedians at Off The Hook, plan for other events

AND: 'We lost an eloquent voice': Author David McCullough spent winters in Naples, loved music

"But our culture and our society are glorifying things that not only do I think are inappropriate morally, but that basic people who aren't Christians would agree are lewd and inappropriate behavior and don't belong in front of our children."

Kathy Lowers, of Southwest Florida Christian Activists, said she wanted to reserve judgment before she would eliminate the entire festival. "I would have to see what it entails. I think there was a lot more going on there. For example, I reported high-THC pot was being sold from tables."

"A lot of people move here to retire or to raise their families, and they love our small-town values here, our family-friendly values," Lowers continued. Those, she said, don't include drag shows and drugs. (Organizers of the Pride Festival produced a police report which concluded the sales were of a legal hemp-derived product and received a city permit.)

LGBTQ+ officials say they're aware the drag show issue is only an opening move.

"They want to keep us from having Pride Fest again," said Cori Craciun, president of Naples Pride, the LGBTQ+ support organization in Collier County. Naples Pride organized the first Naples Pride Fest in 2017.

Daniel Selvey Shaw, representative for GLSEN Collier County, said it goes further than that: "They want to put us back in the closet." He and the others find the evocative terms of "grooming" and "dysphoria" both untrue and mean.

Naples' artists: Youth Haven, Paul Arsenault make a masterpiece with beauty on many levels

Craciun scoffed at the rallying cry of protesters who tell city and county government "The kids should be protected" from seeing Pride events:

"They're the ones attacking the kids. It's like, are you serious?" she said, recalling some of their antagonists appearing at the GLSEN workshop before police sent them away. "The kids were just there to have a good time and to learn. They showed the kids how nasty they can be."

Given the concurrence of Florida's state governrment, with it's so-called "Don't Say Gay" law in schools and bills afoot to eliminate transgender medical procedures or therapy, few in the LGBTQ+ community predicts an end to these attacks soon.

"They're being empowered," Craciun lamented.

Further, Naples City Council will receive a city staff discussion of special events at its parks, including Cambier, because the city currently hosts 300 events requiring special event permits annually. Many of them — from concerts to fundraisers to art sales, even a church service — are at Cambier Park.

That topic, however, was pushed back to Sept. 6 after the marathon 11-hour meeting Aug. 15. When the comes to council, it comes with an addendum: A Special Event Committee recommendation for a moratorium on all new special events on public property while it evaluates the number of events, fees and locations.

The addendum noted city staff wants to develop detailed guidelines on each site, including restrictions for future events, which may require changes to the City Code. Requests for more information from the city had not been answered before publication.

Our founding fathers to the rescue

But the LGBTQ+ population has one powerful ally on its side: the American Constitution, said one Southwest Florida scholar.

Landon Frim, assistant professor of philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University whose research deals with the intersections of religion, ethics and politics, calls the confrontation a First Amendment issue.

"And it's not a two-sided issue. It's a deeply one-sided issue when it comes to civil rights in this country," said Frim, who holds a doctorate in philosophy from both Stony Brook University in New York and Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany.

"The First Amendment protects political speech, but especially here, what's called symbolic political speech. There's a constitutional right enshrined in the First Amendment, to peacably assemble, and especially to peacably assemble when trying to advocate for a particular political viewpoint.

"Private individuals are certainly allowed to have private religious ideas which conflict with, or which are opposed to, some kind of political speech. But they don't have the ability to compel the government to squash speech that they find unpleasant or at odds with their religious faith."

"They certainly have the ability to petition," he said of the Pride Fest complainants. "But it's unconstitutional. Specifically, it's unconstitutional for the government, or the state, to discriminate when it comes to viewpoints."

Harriet Howard Heithaus covers arts and entertainment for the Naples Daily News/naplesnews.com. Reach her at 239-213-6091.

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Naples becoming verbal battleground for LGBTQ+ supporters, opponents