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Residents gathered at a Montcalm County Board of Commissioners meeting in Stanton Monday evening to voice their support and opposition to a Pride event scheduled to be held at a county park later this month.

The Voices of Flat River Pride Festival was approved earlier this year to rent McCarthy Park in Greenville, and given special permission — along with a disc golf event later in the summer — to rent out all three pavilion facilities at the park. The rental would effectively close the park to public use for one day.

Upon learning of the festival, some community members approached the commission hoping to have commissioners revoke their rental agreement on the grounds that the event’s plans violated an often-overlooked park ordinance. 

“Will there be enough parking? Will the sheriff’s department be able to be there to make sure people don’t park on the street? That’s a dangerous corner there,” one commenter said. “We like our small parks. We don’t want big groups there with loud music.”

"Please, return the park to the taxpayers,” another said.

Those concerns were first aired during public comment at a commission meeting late last month. At Monday’s meeting, they were re-emphasized and echoed by a number of people speaking out against the LGBTQ+ community in general. Some cited Bible verses. Other opponents maintained it was not about the nature of the Pride event, simply safety and rule enforcement.

“The law is the law,” one woman said at the podium.

Supporters maintained that the last-second effort to derail their festival was a targeted attempt against their community. They also advocated that the ordinance in question was supposed to be reviewed and updated every five years, but had not been reviewed nor updated since 2006. They also cited a number of other rental situations that were not subjected to the near-decade-old rules. 

Commissioners eventually rejected the calls to revoke the rental agreement on the grounds that the ordinance is not routinely enforced, and the Flat River Pride group spent months carefully planning for and addressing concerns about parking, crowds, bathroom capacity and noise.

“It wasn’t until last week that we had some constituents that came to us with some big concerns,” District 5 Commissioner Charlie Mahar said. “One of those is the ordinance, which is somewhat valid. However, I do believe it’s not right to enforce an ordinance on one group.”

“To say we are all going to be judged based on a decision we make, I want to be on the right side of that judgement. I won’t ever decide against another human being. It will never happen,” said District 3 Commissioner Adam Petersen, an ordained pastor. “I don’t think there is any need to put anything out there about the Good Book. I think the Good Book speaks for itself. … At the end of the day, I don’t want to meet my maker and say I was discriminatory because some people said you wouldn’t like it.”

Petersen added that variances to ordinances are granted often, and that the Flat River Pride group could apply for a variance and make the entire issue disappear. 

“We grant variances almost monthly in Crystal (Township) that breaks laws. So, if we are going to sit here and say we can’t break laws because it’s in an ordinance, all they need to do is apply for a variance, it will be granted at the next meeting, and all this goes away,” he said. “For people to come up here and say this is ridiculous we are going to be violating an ordinance, I expect to see you here when Crystal Township asks to put their houses six inches from property lines.”

Without action to revoke the rental agreement or amend the ordinance, the festival will go on as scheduled and approved on June 28.