City’s pride flag ban upheld by court

By Charles Sercombe
Pride flags are still not permitted to be displayed on public property in Hamtramck.
Recently, a three-judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court for the Eastern District of Michigan upheld the city’s 2023 ban on such flags. That ban was originally passed by an all-male and all-Muslim city council and mayor.
At the time, the council and mayor insisted they adopted the policy as a way to remain “neutral” on the issue, along with most other cultural issues.
But the legal fight to once again permit pride flags to fly will continue, says Russ Gordon — who, along with Catrina Stackpoole, is fighting the city’s policy.
Gordon said his attorney, Marc Susselman, is seeking a rehearing on the matter.
“We believe that the decision is erroneous in many ways,” Gordon said.
According to City Attorney Odey Meroueh, the federal court “held that the city lawfully reserved its flagpoles for the city’s own speech, and that the resolution complies with the First Amendment.”
Meroueh stressed that the decision “places no limits of any kind on private expression. Residents, businesses, and organizations in Hamtramck remain fully free to display any flag or message they choose on their own property.”
He added: “The court recognized what the city has said from the beginning. This was never about any one flag or any one community. It was about whether a city may reserve its own flagpoles for its own speech, and the Sixth Circuit has now confirmed in a published opinion that it may.
“Former Mayor (Amer) Ghalib showed steady leadership on this issue from the start, and this decision is a vindication of that leadership and of the council that enacted the policy. We are grateful for the court’s careful consideration of the case.”
Both Gordon and Stackpoole were volunteer appointees of former mayor Karen Majewski, and served on the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission.
Former mayor Amer Ghalib fired both after they flew a pride flag on a Jos. Campau city-owned flagpole in protest of the ban.
Shortly after the pride flag was raised, police officers removed it.
At the time, Ghalib said the pride flag protest was “expected,” calling it “another unnecessary distraction by the former power structure that doesn’t like to see the city moving forward. Good things are happening for the first time in decades, such as budget surplus and infrastructure repair,” Ghalib said.
“This exposes the former egregious leadership failure, therefore they want to constantly create obstacles on our way.”
Since then, Ghalib has moved on to work for President Trump’s administration, after having whipped up support among Arab and Muslim community members in the metro region for Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.
In a recent post on his Facebook page, Ghalib said he is considering a lawsuit against those who fought against the pride flag ban.
“The option of filing a counter-lawsuit seeking damages for the emotional distress and deliberate defamation inflicted upon us, as well as the financial harm caused to the city, should now be seriously considered,” Ghalib said.
(His entire post can be read on the front page and page 2.)
For several years, Gordon spearheaded donation drives to pay for the international flags that used to be flown on the 18 flagpoles lining Jos. Campau. Those 18 flagpoles now all feature only American flags.
The city only allows the American, state, city and POW flags to be displayed on city property.
After the ban, state Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and married to a woman, condemned the city’s flag ban at a protest rally held in front of city hall in Zussman Park.
Nessel, who is being termed out at the end of the year, said the city’s ban was not an act of neutrality.
“Banning the pride flag is meant to send the very opposite message: a message of intolerance, hatred, and bigotry. … As it’s said, ‘In situations of injustice, neutrality always favors the oppressor, never the oppressed.’
“And, as Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly observed: ‘The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict. Anyone who accepts evil, without protesting against it, is one who cooperates with it.’”
Nessel added: “And make no mistake: homophobia, transphobia, are indeed forms of evil just as much as Islamophobia is.”
Posted Sept. 4, 2026