It would perhaps be an exaggeration to speak of a flag war. But the federal government has now gotten bogged down in this dispute over stripes and state symbolism. Just in time for the gay-lesbian-queer holiday, Christopher Street Day, the Green Federal Minister for Family Affairs Lisa Paus raised a rainbow flag in Berlin. However, the piece of fabric does not show the usual six stripes that stand for sexual and gender diversity. Paus hoisted the so-called Progress flag, a striped cloth with a triangle inside, reminiscent of the South African flag.
The action would probably not have attracted much attention in the busy federal government if the Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, had not vetoed it. The social democrat is responsible for flags to federal authorities. It was also Germany’s first interior minister who, for the first time in April, allowed the rainbow flag to be flown over her own ministry, but also over the Bundestag and the Chancellery. However, Faeser decided that colleague Paus’ flag, the one with the triangle, had to come down from the mast. She has warned the family minister twice. Unsuccessful. The thing is still hanging.
“We as a house claim the pioneering role for the visibility of sexual and gender diversity,” said the spokeswoman for the Minister for Family Affairs on Wednesday. The additional triangle in the Progress flag is “a sign of solidarity with trans and interpersonal people”. Transsexual people do not identify with their biological sex, intersex people are born with sex organs that are not clearly male or female. And because the Ministry of Family Affairs is currently working on a law that will end discrimination against such groups, Paus raised the Progress flag, which has a triangle for transgender and intersex people and two arrow-shaped stripes for people of colour, i.e. non-white people.
Why what is flagged where – there is a decree
Interior Minister Faeser, who actually saw herself as at the forefront of progress, is now in the awkward position of having to refer to regulations such as the “Federal Government Decree on Flags Displaying Federal Offices”. The set of rules, published in Federal Gazette No. 61 on April 1, 2005, page 4982, specifies why what may be hoisted where in Germany and on which day. “Flags are to be hung on vertical flagpoles,” it says, for example.
A spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior added that “not just anything can be flagged at will.” It goes without saying, he assured, that the entire federal government is concerned with “strengthening the acceptance and protection of sexual minorities and gender diversity.” That’s why Faeser also allowed the rainbow flag on federal buildings, a “worldwide symbol for this movement”. The approval of “other logo flags on federal buildings”, on the other hand, is “generally not granted”. After all, it’s not about just any textile, but about the “acceptance of state symbols in our population”. Family Minister Paus was unimpressed. Because there are no penalties for false flags.