A Pride flag hung until recently in Gardiner Area High School, sending to LGBTQ students the message that they belong, just like everyone else.

It’s the right message to send to a group of students who haven’t always been treated well, and who now face a targeted attack by some of the most powerful people in the country.

For some other students, however, it was just too much.

One student, the Kennebec Journal reported last week, placed a flag supporting former President Trump over the Pride flag, causing what Superintendent Pat Hopkins called a “heated” argument between students.

As a result, school officials took down both flags. Principal Chad Kempton portrayed this response as “neutral.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. While Kempton and other school officials may have thought they were de-escalating a dangerous situation, they were really taking the side of bigotry.

It’s the same mistake being made around the country right now. Pride Month displays meant to celebrate the inclusion of LGBTQ people in our communities — after decades in which they were denied rights available to other Americans — are being attacked by a political movement that wants them to be erased from public life.

Rather than stand up to this misguided minority, people are giving in. Some communities are taking down Pride flags. Bud Light couldn’t run fast enough from a small promotion involving a transgender social media figure after it was criticized by conservatives. Target and Starbucks have both moved or taken down Pride displays in response to the same kind of small-minded yelps.

And that’s the problem with these fights. LGBTQ Americans have to claw every inch of the way for their rights, while their opponents only have to scream and froth enough to shut the whole thing down.

And screaming and frothing against the existence of LGBTQ Americans is pretty much the whole public-facing point of the Republican Party right now.

It’s hard to get voters behind a party whose chief legislative goals are tax cuts for the rich and an end to environmental regulations for big business, so right-wing leaders have used the culture war to keep control over their followers.

For a long time, that meant railing against the dangers of same-sex marriage and the “gay agenda”; now, with the absurdity of those statements clear to most people, they’ve moved on to “transgender insanity.”

Whatever keeps ’em angry and lashing out at others, and voting for them, I guess.

Former President Trump said as much last week during a speech in North Carolina. Trump, just after he was indicted on 37 counts related to the mishandling of some of country’s most sensitive secrets, told the crowd that he never gets cheers when talks about tax cuts.

But when he talks about transgenderism, “everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.”

So politicians like Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the two front-runners for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, tell their followers that support for LGBTQ Americans is a sign of our failing country, rather than a way to live up to its founding promise.

Then, their followers take that message directly to our LGBTQ neighbors. They have destroyed Pride displays and threatened employees at numerous stores, harassed athletes at competitions, menaced drag shows, and called in bomb threats to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care. They’ve demeaned teachers and librarians, and unleashed slurs against LGBTQ people at every opportunity.

These acts are pathetic, and they are most often done, at all levels, to gain attention. But that doesn’t make them any less frightening. They are akin to terrorism, aimed at making any LGBTQ member of our community, or their ally, afraid to assert their own rights, or even to go out in public.

A lot of this behavior has obviously trickled down from parent to child. On the same day as the incident in Gardiner, at a middle school in Burlington, Mass., some students held a “counter protest” against a student-led Pride event, with students chanting that their pronouns were “U.S.A.”

Just to show where this is coming from, and where it may be going, antisemitic and racist graffiti was found in the school’s bathroom a few days later.

By taking down both the Pride and Trump flags, the school administrators in Gardiner tried to send the message that every student should be treated the same.

Instead, they gave the bullies just what they wanted — and in doing so, let down kids who just wanted to show they belong.