Cedar Falls, IA, Hosts Its First Pagan Pride Festival

I know a few people within Iowa's Pagan community. It goes back to when I first visited Iowa City's annual paranormal expo and when I was helping to kick off Iowa City community radio station. I became Facebook friends with a Pagan guy who has his own Internet radio program and eventually became aware of efforts to create Pagan Pride Festival in Eastern Iowa. That Pagan Pride Festival happened yesterday in Cedar Falls, IA.

KCRG had an interesting article about the Cedar Valley Pagan Pride Festival. It described the basics of Paganism:

Pagans are polytheists, meaning they worship more than one god, much like ancient Greeks or Romans.

It described the reason for holding the Pagan Pride Festival:

Those hosting the event said they often times are stigmatized as evil and that simply isn’t the case.

It offered a pull quote from one of the event's organizers:

“We need to diminish biases and unnatural fears,” Sue Wright, President of Northern Iowa Pagan Alliance, said. “We’re not evil people. We don’t do evil things. We worship the divine just like anybody else.”

And it offered a really weird fun-fact that's not really grounded in fact:

Wright said it is common for paganists to dress in robes and armor on an everyday basis.

All within 30 seconds.

That last bit actually amused many of the Pagans that I know online.


According to Wright, close to 500 people arrived for yesterday's Cedar Valley Pagan Pride Festival.