Politics
Christian Ulvert: Freedom under pressure
I did not expect to find the meaning of this trip at an airport gate.
I traveled to Amsterdam with the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute and the Victory Fund to help lead our global affairs programs for WorldPride. This year’s theme, Unity, deliberately reflected an uncomfortable truth: equal rights remain out of reach in much of the world, and even where progress has been made, it is increasingly under attack. I knew the statistics. I knew the stakes. What I did not know was how personal it would all feel before I had even reached the city.
Waiting at the gate, I found myself thinking about WorldPride — not just the celebration itself, but what it means to bring hundreds of thousands of people from more than a hundred countries together. Then a couple walked past me. I do not know their names. I do not know where they were headed or where they had been. But I heard one of them say to the other, simply and without performance, “God loves me.”
That was it. Three words, spoken in passing, became the lens through which I experienced everything that followed.
It wasn’t rehearsed or intended for anyone else to hear, but it captured what WorldPride is really about. Beneath the parades, celebrations, and policy discussions is a simple truth: LGBTQ people are not exceptions to grace. We are not footnotes. We are not debates to be settled in legislatures or dismissed from pulpits.
God loves me. Full stop.
That phrase mattered because of where I heard it and why I was there. Victory Institute and Victory Fund exist to build political power for LGBTQ people and to elect leaders who understand that representation is not symbolic — it is structural. We do not train candidates or support officials because visibility is the only goal.
We do it because visibility without power is fragile, and freedom without protection is temporary.
This year’s WorldPride also marked the 25th anniversary of the Netherlands becoming the first country in the world to legalize marriage equality — a reminder of what lasting progress looks like when it is embedded not just in law, but in culture and public institutions.
But it is also a reminder of how quickly that progress can be threatened. This year’s WorldPride Human Rights Conference, running alongside the celebration, was created because organizers know that rights already won are under real pressure in dozens of countries, including right here in the United States.
During the conference, Dutch leaders announced a new €22.5 million investment over three years to strengthen LGBTQ safety. It was a reminder that protecting equality requires more than celebrating it — democracies must invest in it. Marriage protections, the basic right to exist publicly and safely: none of it is guaranteed permanently anywhere.
Freedom, it turns out, is not a status. It is a practice. It must be exercised, defended, and renewed, generation after generation, election after election.
That is the tension in the title of this reflection. Freedom under pressure is not freedom denied. It is freedom that is being tested. And it is freedom that is still, defiantly, being lived. I saw that courage in the delegates from countries where simply attending WorldPride carries real personal risk. I heard it in a stranger’s voice before I had even set foot in Amsterdam.
Victory Institute and Victory Fund will keep doing the unglamorous work of building power, so that moments like the one I witnessed at an airport gate no longer feel extraordinary. They should be ordinary. A simple expression of faith. A simple affirmation of dignity. A simple reminder that every person deserves the freedom to live authentically and without fear.
God loves me. God loves us. That is worth building a movement to protect.
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Christian Ulvert serves on the national LGBTQ Victory Fund and is the founder and president of EDGE Communications, a leading Florida-based public affairs and political consulting firm headquartered in Miami.
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