For Toronto council to sponsor this year’s Pride parade with a $260,000 taxpayer-funded grant would be morally indefensible.

It would mean the city is officially condoning an organization that has specifically excluded certain city workers from participating at one of its major events.

Not only police officers in general, but gay and lesbian officers, who have asked council, through Toronto Police Association President Mike McCormack, to withdraw the grant.

This request is reasonable and council should support it.

These officers are not asking the city to refuse the $750,000 of in-kind services it provides to the Pride festival every year, mainly for policing the parade.

Uniformed officers will be there, as usual, directing traffic and ensuring public safety.

But there is no reason for the city to continue its optional $260,000 annual grant.

Pride’s position, which grew out of demands from Black Lives Matter, which hijacked last year’s parade, makes no sense.

Pride clearly has no problem with uniformed officers providing security for the parade.

And yet it is claiming that the presence of a police float in the parade, or a police booth during the Pride festival, even ones staffed by LGBTQ officers, will so traumatize members of the LGBTQ community, that they will feel threatened and unable to participate in Pride.

This is utterly absurd, and surely city councillors know it.

Threatened by what?

By the presence of police officers who are either members of the LGBTQ community themselves, or members of the general policing community, who believe in promoting good relations between the police and LGBTQ community?

If members of the LGBTQ community are in fact so threatened merely by the presence of police officers at the Pride parade, then surely the uniformed officers who will be providing traffic control and public security will traumatize them.

Indeed, to a far greater extent than LGBTQ officers who would otherwise be participating in the Pride parade.

It’s time for council to confront what the backers of the police ban at the Pride parade are really trying to do, which is to delegitimize and demonize Toronto’s police service.

How can city council possibly support this strategy by giving $260,000 of taxpayers’ money to Pride?

We appreciate Mayor John Tory’s desire to seek a resolution to this issue which will satisfy everyone.

His goal is laudable.

But surely he knows, from his own attempts at negotiating with Black Lives Matter, that reaching an agreement with them on this issue is not going to happen.

It is naive to think otherwise and it’s time for council to stand up for its police service, including LGBTQ officers.

Unless, of course, council agrees with Black Lives Matter that the city’s police force is systemically racist, homophobic and cannot be trusted, which is what giving Pride a $260,000 grant this year will be implying.