A lot of Fort Worth social media users have gone from “I back the blue!” to “I back the blue, but …” since the blue was captured on video trying to keep a street preacher with a bullhorn from possibly interjecting needless drama into a peaceful, celebratory festival. Or worse.
From Trinity Pride Fest on the Near Southside in late June, video recently surfaced showing a Fort Worth police officer telling street preacher David Grisham that any offensive speech from his mouth or bullhorn could catch him a disorderly conduct charge.
A fellow street preacher nearby togged a T-shirt with the inflammatory inscription “HOMO SEX IS A SIN.”
“Are you really going to ticket us for offensive speech?” Grisham asks the officer in the video.
“Yes, absolutely,” the cop replies. “It’s called ‘disorderly conduct.’ ”
To the long subsequent back-and-forth between Grisham and the Fort Worth cop and Grisham’s ultimate citation, a similar recent case may offer some legal clarity. In Minnesota in 2025, a white woman was charged with disorderly conduct for hurling the N-word at an autistic 8-year-old Black boy and a nearby Black adult because that type of behavior is totally acceptable in this country now. Underlining how the current White House and state-propaganda outlets like Fox News and Newsmax have normalized hatred, a crowdfunding campaign raised nearly $1 million for the racist white woman despite her paltry sentence of a $1,000 fine and some community service. Back in normal times, racism regularly resulted in wide opprobrium, but in this country under this loathsome, corrupt, $500-goldtone-cellphone oligarchical regime, it now pays to hate people for the color of their skin.
Courtesy Instagram
Or hate them for who they love.
Conservatives online are “back the bigots” now when they backed the blue without fail so often before.
Conservatives backed the blue when the blue fatally shot an unarmed Black woman, Atatiana Jefferson, in her mom’s home in Fort Worth.
“Cops have tough jobs,” the blue backers claimed. “We all make mistakes.”
Conservatives backed the blue when the blue kneeled on an unarmed George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, killing him.
“He was on drugs,” a crime now apparently punishable by death, according to the blue backers.
Conservatives backed the blue when the blue fatally choked an unarmed Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes, another crime punishable by death, according to the blue backers.
Conservatives backed the blue when the blue no-knocked an unarmed Breonna Taylor and fatally shot her while looking for someone else.
Conservatives backed the blue when the blue shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice for holding — not aiming — a toy pellet gun.
Conservatives back the blue now as the blue refuse to investigate, comment on, or perform an autopsy on Juliana Umba Nzita, a Black teen hanged from a tree twice her height outside a church she never attended in North Carolina.
Conservatives back the blue now as the blue has killed a 17-year-old Black Austin child experiencing a mental-health crisis at a playground who called police for help and was met with bullets as he went to retrieve a water bottle from his waistband.
Conservatives back the blue now as the blue and their wealthy, white overlords try to cover up the murder or manslaughter of Black 18-year-old Nolan Wells in Mississippi.
So, now conservatives need to back the blue when the blue attempts to maintain the peace and keep some loudmouths from fomenting violence in Fort Worth. It’s time for conservatives to support the Fort Worth Police Officers Association, the union whose leadership “unequivocally stands” behind the officers in question.
Sadly, overall, hypocrisy from conservatives is nothing new. It’s actually a defining characteristic of their way of thinking.
Conservatives are pro-life … until it’s time to feed, clothe, house, nurture, and parent the baby.
Conservatives despise socialism … until their houses catch fire or the federal government needs to bail out Wall Street to the tune of $1 trillion, offers $1 trillion in subsidies to oil and gas, or sends billions of dollars to farmers to bail them out.
Conservatives support freedom of religion … unless that religion is Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or anything else not Christian.
Living in a political system in which one side’s adherents see only the 1950s version of every argument and can Biblify (capital “B”) any fact to suit their needs is what has led over the decades to pushbacks in the form of minority celebrations like Black History Month, Indigenous American Month, Pride festivals, and others. Minorities must go out of their way to say they simply exist only because conservatives have made this country so utterly unwelcoming and dangerous to non-whites, non-straights, and non-Christians — if not deadly to them.
Since the untrustworthy federal government is responsible for documenting hate crimes, other entities like the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) work overtime to keep track, warning in March, “Racist hate speech by political leaders, including the president [of the United States], combined with intensified immigration crackdowns in the United States, notably near schools, hospitals, and faith-based institutions, has sparked grave human rights violations,” including the killing and lawless jailing of multiple unarmed civilians.
During this second term of 34-count felon, insurrectionist, and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump, hate crimes, based on independent data, have also increased against non-Christians, Muslims in particular. “Muslim Americans are confronting a new surge of hateful rhetoric amplified online and echoed by some of the country’s most prominent Republican officials,” PBS said in March, leading to violent attacks.
For as much hatred directed toward non-whites and non-Christians as there is in these disUnited States, the LGBTQ+ community comes under particular fire.
Between May 1, 2024, and May 1, 2025, GLAAD tracked 932 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents across the country, which amounts to 2.5 per day. “Violent attacks included in this year’s count resulted in 84 injuries and 10 deaths.”
Many of these incidents occurred during Pride events like Trinity Pride Fest, based on GLAAD’s data, making 2025 “one of the most dangerous years on record for LGBTQ Americans.”
If you think hurting people for who they love is living in Jesus’ image, you may want to reacquaint yourself with the Bible. Jesus, like those “He Gets Us” ads say, welcomed everybody, especially outcasts like what minorities have become via authoritarian force and systemic private, public, and corporate oppression in this country.
Perhaps the biggest group Jesus was not a big fan of was the “money changers,” which is interesting because as much as it pays to be virally racist, it may soon pay to be virally confrontational toward gays. Litigious street preacher Grisham has retained a lawyer and may sue the city, and he may be a rich man shortly in a country where hardworking people who mind their own business can’t even afford their astronomical insurance premiums or contaminated groceries.
If any tables are to be overturned violently anywhere today, Jesus would be doing that at Grisham’s house, not the cop’s.
This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
