If you want to know what a symbol means, ask people other than you. Ask people who aren't Americans who live in countries where they don't have freedoms we've long sine taken for granted. It doesn't even have to be taken to the extreme like comparing us to North Korea with actual slave labor prison camps.

On the rare occasion an American military unit gets lost on training and lands/ends up on some random farm, they are greeted as friends from one side of the planet to the other. Two stories from South America to the Eastern EU both had the same basic thing happen when some equipment malfunctioned and the people just wanted pictures with them. "It's the gringos!" I can't find the video, but I laughed my ass off at that line.

That flag is a symbol of freedom at the end of a bloody mercilessly hard fight. The United States faced down every challenger to the Western order of individual freedom and won. It isn't perfect, nothing ever will be, but the LGBTQ among us will attest to how important those freedoms can be. They still die everyday even trying to hide who they are. They don't have to do that here.