Pride month incident - how would you have handled this?

My two boys age 9 and 7 are riding bikes around the neighborhood with a buddy of theirs. There are a couple houses in my neighborhood where the neighbors put out little gay pride flags for people walking by to take one.

I tell my kids we are respectful to everyone no matter race or creed. But when it comes to “gay pride” I simply tell them, we don’t do that and we don’t believe in that. For us it is frankly something we feel is a religious obligation more so than a political opinion. My kids don’t even really understand what being “gay” is or means. They just vaguely know that some people have “two dads” or “two moms” which they just sort of think is kind of funny.

Well we are walking and we see our boys and their friend with these little gay pride flags in their hand they picked up from the neighbors that leave them out waving them down the street. I had a visceral reaction to it and I ran over and took them away and said “we don’t do that. We don’t celebrate that.”

They didn’t know what they meant. My boys friend was like “it’s not bad it’s for prime year.” No idea what it was all about. I don’t want to make too big of a deal about it but I’m not having my kids riding around waving gay pride flags. It’s a touchy subject because they don’t even really understand what being gay IS and I don’t want to go into details for obvious reasons.

Mainly I’m just annoyed that liberals and gays put us in this situation every year. The gay pride flag for me is as offensive as a swastika or something like that. It’s very distressing having it get pushed on my kids.