Please don't put a rainbow in your window!

[RuffleCrow]

For the past few years the rainbow has sadly becomea symbol of silencing, sexual stereotyping and oppression for a lot of women and those in the LGB community. If you're thinking of putting one up, please think about how that may make women feel - many of whom have already experienced death threats and lost their friends and jobs thanks to those who wield the rainbow flag as a weapon.

I just saw two on my walk just now and it made me feel like shit. Not the intended effect I'm sure. Please consider something else: the sun coming out from a cloud, or a simple landscape. Thanks.

Ruffle, I’m a GC feminist. I get your point, I really do.

But the rainbow flag is already everywhere. All summer, every summer. In the NHS, on twitter bios. It’s not something that can be avoided easily and children already think of it as a familiar sight. It’s already in their brains.

The rainbow that is being put in windows is not a flag. It’s an actual 🌈 which has been a symbol of brighter things to come for far longer than its associations with the LGBT community. Even if someone with dubious motives had orchestrated a social media campaign, what does it matter? Children aren’t thinking ‘oh, there’s the LGBT flag.’ They’re looking at it as a rainbow coming after the rain, in an otherwise scary and confusing time for them. Or seeing them as akin to collecting Pokemon!

You’re asking people to alter their completely innocent and reasonable behaviour because it upsets you and hurts your feelings. Who else does that?

@RuffleCrow But this rainbow 🌈 Is not the same as the flag below.
Why Can’t you appreciate them being seperate things
By all means develop any feeling you want on the flag. But let kids draw natural phenomena that give hope after storms

Please explain why they are the same
The LGBT movement took on a natural symbol for a flag they must expect therefore to see it elsewhere

Well that's my afternoon "lesson plan" sorted. Painting Rainbows with DS 15.

He has severe learning difficulties, loves Thomas the Tank Engine AND Rainbows (including) the TV show of my youth.

Try telling him he shouldn't use/like them OP.

"somewhere over streets and houses, Rainbows flying high!" they certainly will be now here.

I feel for you OP, I am equally as concerned with how the lgbtq+ movement is heading, I find it all very uncomfortable. But sometimes a rainbow really is just a rainbow 🌈

Trans flag isn't a rainbow anyway - it's the crappy pink, blue and white one, isn't it?

I don’t think that a rainbow for children to spot and the LGBT rainbow flag need be mutually exclusive. People can be an LGBT activist or supporter and look forward to all this being over.

YABU. Children love rainbows - I have one on my fridge that my DD did nearly 20 years ago now.

You're quite right, OP. And the vast majority of people who are abusing you on this thread have simply never given the extent to which women's rights are being eroded by an increasingly powerful tiny minority of men posing as an oppressed class a second thought.

You know that people are putting up the rainbows to make others feel cheerful.

I am guessing that in real life, if you saw that your neighbour had put up a rainbow picture to amuse her grandchildren, you wouldn't go up to her and tell her that the lovely innocent picture she'd put up for lovely reasons was a symbol of opression, and that seeing it had made you upset? Because you wouldn't want her to feel bad about something intended to be nice, right?

I had no idea that a rainbow was symbolic of female oppression
I had no idea that it was also synonymous with science-denial and experimenting on children with untested drugs
I had no idea that people were seriously overthinking the idea that a rainbow could be anything other than a bright symbol of hope

@RuffleCrow don’t you think that it is perfectly possible that a rainbow could mean different things to different people?
After all, it isn’t offensive (to probably 99.9% of the population) or illegal to have a picture of a rainbow.

YABV overthinkingly U.

Lol this really has brightened up my day.

Trying to get back to the UK and just had not 1 but 2 flight cancelled on us just booked a third and hope we can fly back early hours on 25th and this is all you have to worry about some kids drawing rainbows 🌈

Bring back Rod Jane and Freddy. Life was much simpler when they were on the tv.

Up above the streets and houses,
Rainbow climbing high.
Everyone can see it climbling
Through the sky.

Paint the whole world with a rainbow!

All along the streams and rivers,
Shining in the lakes.
See the colours of the rainbow,
As the morning breaks.

Paint the whole world with a rainbow!

Oh get a grip

A swastika and you would have a point OP.

Rainbows......not so much.

I clicked on the thread expecting the op to say don’t do it because it encourages people to go out looking for them, but oh dear.........

How ironic that years ago homophobes complained that 'the gays' had stolen the rainbow symbol and were using it as part of their nefarious secret agenda to oppress 'family values' and corrupt the young.......and now this.

Sorry, identity politics have been cancelled due to coronavirus

Try again when the endtimes have finished

I'm not going to be bullied out of my personal feelings on this matter.

But it’s entirely ok to use your own agenda to shame people for doing something fun, using a picture of a natural phenomenon that has been synonymous with childhood drawing since as far back as I remember?

Behave!

Can someone explain why the rainbow is a symbol of oppression? I’ve never heard that.

We're about to paint our rainbow to put in the window. We're also going to do a smilie sun! 🌈 🌞

I have no idea what is going on here.

Sorry OP but you are being ridiculous. For a start it's not a rainbow flag, it's a rainbow (which in contract to what on earth you are going on about, is a natural scientific phenomena that is often a sign of beauty and hope after a stormy or difficult period).

Secondly kids like rainbows because they are pretty and colourful and easy to draw.

Thirdly most kids at this time have been pulled from school and all of their friends, and also may be forced away from their extended family (such as grandparents) for possibly weeks or months, which is incredibly upsetting for them. If seeing a rainbow in a window makes one of those kids happier for a few seconds, then how the fuck you can be offended and upset by that I don't know.

Grow the fuck up. I say that a nurse who will watch countless people die over the next few months, and will be forced to stay away from almost all my friends and family to keep them as safe as I can. In addition to trying to keep my 2 DDs safe and happy, and try to give them some sort of an education over the next few months, whilst they can't see their friends or our extended family. I wish all the fuck I had to worry about right now was rainbows in peoples windows.

Children like rainbows. Get a grip