Memorial to Orlando victims outside the Stonewall Inn — Kathy Willens/AP

❝ President Obama is designating a new national monument around the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.

The Stonewall National Monument in New York City will be the first addition to the National Park System specifically highlighting the history of the LGBT community.

❝ The monument covers nearly 8 acres in New York’s Greenwich Village including a landmark gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. In June of 1969, patrons at the bar fought back against police persecution — an event that’s widely seen as a watershed in the campaign for LGBT rights.

“Raids like these were nothing new, but this time the patrons had had enough,” Obama said in a White House video announcing the new monument. “So they stood up and spoke out. The riots became protests. The protests became a movement. The movement ultimately became an integral part of America.”…

❝ Designation of the Stonewall monument comes just days before the first anniversary of the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. It also follows less than two weeks after 49 patrons at a gay bar in Orlando, Fla., were killed in a mass shooting.

Like most advances in civil rights for Americans, religious conservatives recognize the change as somehow limiting their own freedom. A critical point of hypocrisy that unites the politically backwards of America with their peers in history. Fools who believed that hating other human beings on the basis of skin color, religion [or non-religion], where their parents were born, etc., were characteristics that should define full citizenship in the Land of the Free.

Not worthy of much more than contempt.