#@sfpride

Yesterday when SF Pride announced Bradley Manning as the Grand Marshal of the 2013 San Francisco Pride Parade, our Occupy hearts swelled. The SF Pride electorate had, for the first time since the 1969 Stonewall riots, offered the Queer community a chance to return to their Radical Roots. 

Sadly this evening, the SF Pride board members appear to have succumb to pressure from 'the war mongering establishment', and have now stepped back their decision to appoint whistleblower Manning as their Marshal. 

Pro-Manning counter demonstrations are already being planned.

Tonight we recall the words of Daniel Ellsberg as he speaks of the hero that SF Pride has shunned, "For the third straight year, Manning has been nominated for the Noble Peace Prize by, among others, Tunisian parliamentarians. Given the role the WikiLeaks cables played in the Arab Spring, and their role in speeding up the end of the Iraq War, I can think of no one more deserving who is deserving of the peace prize.

He's also deserving of the Congressional Medal of Honor. This medal, awarded by Congress--and not the executive branch--is given to military personnel, who during wartime, do what they should do for their country and their comrades, at the greatest risk to themselves.

Of course, there have been many who shown great courage on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq. But some have noted that we don't have the named heroes of the kind we did during World War I and World War II, such as Sergeant York or Audie Murphy.

I see a hero in these wars whose example should inspire others. His name Bradley Manning."