People of myriad sexual and gender identities across the U.S. will spend June celebrating Pride Month, a commemoration of the decades-long fight for civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community. But in Arkansas, residents will instead be celebrating a new invention.Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders bestowed a new name on June, dubbing it “Fidelity Month,” per a new declaration.The effort is intended to cultivate “fidelity to God, family, community, and country,” and to a “healthy, stable, well-ordered society.” The memo underscores the values of faith, liberty, and patriotism, which Sanders’s office argue are the country’s founding principles, and notes the commemorative month aims to elevate “spiritual and civic institutions” at the core of the state’s “collective identity.”It’s hard not to see the move as a direct attack on the LGBTQ+ community and everything it’s achieved.Pride has been the preeminent June celebration since 1970. The protests and parades that take place throughout the month commemorate the history of the Stonewall Uprising, which lasted for six days but began on June 28, 1969, when police raided one of the city’s most popular gay bars, the Stonewall Inn. Incensed by the incursion, New York City’s LGBTQ+ community rebelled, marching through the streets in one of the most significant acts of civil rights disobedience in U.S. history.At the time, homosexuality was criminalized in every U.S. state save Illinois, which granted individuals the right to express their sexuality in private in 1962.Sanders’s order comes at a complicated time for gay rights. There are currently 530 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across the country, according to a legislation tracker created by the American Civil Liberties Union. They include attempts to censor school curriculums, redefine sex, create anti-transgender health care barriers, prohibit drag, and force minors out of the closet in school settings.In Arkansas specifically, state laws do not protect LGBTQ+ people from being fired, evicted, or denied services due to sexual orientation or gender identity. The state Supreme Court ruled against nondiscrimination ordinances in 2017, blocking local, voter-approved referendums to create a more explicitly LGBTQ+ friendly community.But Arkansas isn’t the only state making an unsubtle jab at gay rights. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee recently signed a similar resolution, marking June as “Nuclear Family Month.” The bill’s text defines the nuclear family as “consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children” as intended by “God’s design.”Meanwhile, marriage equality is nationally upheld by the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, a protection that seems increasingly fragile in light of the court’s decision to overturn abortion access via its 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.At the time, Justice Clarence Thomas penned a concurring opinion in Dobbs, arguing that the court “should reconsider” its substantive due process precedents, including its rulings on contraception, same-sex marriage, and even same-sex relationships.