Lexi Magnusson is a resident of Washington State, the married mother of four children and unwillingly to come to blows with those she disagrees with. After recently encountering a new neighbor who had moved from Oregon and welcoming the neighbor’s family to the neighborhood, Mrs. Magnusson was informed that the neighbor had relocated her family in order to avoid the “gays and transgenders” of Oregon and that she was sickened at the normalization of such behavior.
Rather than slug the woman across the face for holding a bigoted opinion, Magnusson picked up 10,000 Christmas lights and arranged them in a rainbow pattern. The electricity bill for illuminating a rainbow of color is likely far less costly than the costs involved in an assault charge. Magnusson explained on her Facebook page that, prior to the inspired purchase, she only had white Christmas lights. She was certain that the prismatic display make her point known to her neighbor; that Oregon isn’t the only area with people accepting of LGBTQ individuals.
In a follow-up question aimed at discovering her neighbor’s reaction to the display, Magnusson remarked that the neighbor has been unwilling to speak with her further regardless of how over-exaggerated Magnusson gets in waving her over to chat. Inspired by Magnusson’s cheerful activism, the neighbor who lives opposite to the bigoted, former-resident of Oregon has decided to order a rainbow flag just so the woman has to see the display through her window every day of the week. Despite the feelings of Magnusson’s ex-Oregonian neighbor, Magnusson’s Facebook post has gained more than 13k likes and nearly 2k shares.
The rainbow flag that has come to symbolize LGBTQ pride did not come into fashion until 1978. Gilbert Baker, the flag’s designer, claims to have been inspired by the striped, multicolored “Flag of the Races” that was popular among the Hippie movement of the 1960s, rather than from the iconic song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that was sung by gay icon Judy Garland in the 1939 version of “The Wizard of Oz.” While the original version of the flag featured eight stripes, with the first stripe being a bright pink symbolic of sexuality, later versions abandoned the pink due to the difficulty of acquiring hot-pink fabric and the surge in popularity the flag received upon the death of Harvey Milk, the first openly homosexual politician in California and the United States of America. The current model of the flag has evolved to have six stripes, merging indigo and turquoise as a royal blue. In spectrum order, the colors represent life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic or art, serenity or harmony and lastly, spirit.