Amazon mocked for trying to make ‘Straight Pride’ Badge happen

Amazon Prime has been criticised after it started selling a Straight Pride badge.

The retail giant put up for purchase the gold-plated flag pin for a company called 100 Flags – which also sells Pride rainbow flags as well as banners, badges and pins from around the world – but the latest addition has been dubbed homophobic by social media users.

The pin was being sold via the online shopping giant in the UK for £4.50, and in contrast to the brightly-coloured rainbow flag, featured several tones of brown and beige.

It was mocked on social media, with many LGBT people an straight allies critiquing both the design and the lack of need for such a flag to exist.

One user wrote: “Love that sour heterosexuals managed to come up with the most sinfully boring ‘straight pride’ flag imaginable. This isn’t a flag, it’s a dulux colour chart.”

Another response added: “The point of ‘straight pride’ is really to make fun of queer people. Fortunately, this thing is as hideous and bland as the folks who would buy it.”

Another commented: “Straight Pride is seemingly as beige as most straight people’s personalities.”

With another adding: “This is actually really gross and homophobic.”

Someone else, presumably heterosexual, wrote: “As a straight person I would like to apologise for this abomination.”

Flag-making specialists, 1000 Flags, initially defended the product amid the wave of criticism. The company said that the design came from an “existing image available online.”

It insisted: “In no way were either badge produced as an anti-LGBT item and we take offence with that suggestion. These are not hate symbols. Our extensive range of LGBT flags, Pin Badges and Embroidered patches has helped spread LGBT pride across the world.”

However, it has now pulled the product from sale on its website and on Amazon after the backlash.

‘Straight Pride’ events have previously been held by anti-LGBT activists across the world.

In 2015, a Seattle man tried to organise a ‘Heterosexual Pride’ parade and blamed gay people for no-one else turning up.

Creating a public Facebook event, he wrote: “We all have the right to celebrate the way of life we have chosen for ourselves. In the name of equality & equal rights, I have created this event to celebrate our right to be heterosexual, and to encourage younger heterosexuals that they should be proud of their heterosexuality.”

However, despite inviting thousands of people to attend via Facebook, Rebello appears to be the only attendee of the actual parade, posting a photograph of himself holding black balloons and a ‘straight pride’ sign.

He claimed in a follow-up Facebook post: “A lot of heterosexuals don’t want their pictures taken because they are scared of the LGBT community. Look at the way they have treated me.”

A now-defunct group named Straight Pride UK was launched in 2013, claiming that straight people are “persecuted every day”, and that it is “not easy to be straight.”

The group claimed: “Being straight is not easy under the circumstances of our society. Straight people are being persecuted every day by political correctness.” Its website stated: “Heterosexuals do not have equality, homosexuals have more rights than any sector of society. They have the right to take over city streets, dress ridiculously, and parade with danger and contempt, invade hotels and B&B’s run and owned by people who object to homosexuality, and then sue them when refusal is given. Straight Pride, we believe are normal everyday people, dressed normally, walking and behaving normally, to raise awareness of being straight, and being PROUD to be heterosexual.”