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Pride Month as an Exercise of Raw Political Power
What we now call “Pride Month” (formerly June) began as “Gay Freedom Day” back in the 1970s. (I learned quite a bit about its history while researching a novel about a time-traveling gay rock star who saves the world from Madonna with help from David Bowie and Yoko Ono.) In the early years, pride events were opportunities — in the pre-internet Dark Age — for gays and lesbians to meet one another and socialize, away from the sleaze of the bars and bathhouses. (Of course, the bars and bathhouses were also packed during these events, but still…)
At some point in the 1980s, “Gay Freedom Day” became “Pride Week.” By the 21st century, it had expanded to a full month … and then two months, one for pride and one for celebrating LGBT history. As they consumed ever more dates on the calendar, they claimed victory after victory. Until, finally, everything the gay rights movement claimed as their goals back in the 1980s had been achieved.
Gays and lesbians are no longer on the margins but are broadly accepted in the mainstream of society. Gays now enjoy the unalloyed support of both major political parties and are embraced by all major religions (with one gigantic exception). Employment discrimination, as a practical matter, does not exist. Corporations, in fact, brag about their “not at all secret gay agendas.”
The gay rights movement won everything, but admitting victory would have meant professional advocates giving up a lucrative money stream. I mean, come on, you couldn’t expect people at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG), or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to give up their plushy advocacy “work” and get real jobs. To continue their easy lives of cashing donor checks and performative protest, they needed to take on new causes. Just as “Pride” consumed evermore of the calendar, the activist movement centered on sexual proclivity consumed more and more of the alphabet (LGBTQQIP2SAA, LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP).
This need for a new purpose is how forcing bakers and florists to participate in gay weddings and letting biological males use the ladies’ room became “civil rights issues.” Even the 2016 Libertarian candidate for president stated that for government not to force bakers to participate in gay weddings was tantamount to permitting people to murder each other in the name of religion. An allegedly conservative Supreme Court ruled that the Government could, probably, force you to bake a cake for a gay wedding as long as they weren’t too explicit about their religious animosity.
That wedding cakes and bathrooms became the rallying cry for LGBTQ+ activists proved that they had lost the thread. The current push to indoctrinate young children in “Queer Ideology,” encourage pre-teens to go on hormone drugs, and take little kids on field trips to drag clubs shows any sensible person the LGBTQ+ activists have not just lost the thread, they’ve lost their damn minds. But the Alphabet People have so much political and social power now that calling them out on their insanity can only be done from outside the mainstream. J.K. Rowling found herself pushed out of the mainstream simply for planting her flag on the existence of two distinct biological sexes. The Alphabet People have so much power that they can deny biological reality itself.
Pride Month is no longer a rally for a disadvantaged minority, but a raw assertion of the vast social and political power of a no-longer disadvantaged minority. Entertainment networks promote programming aimed at alternative sexual orientations and lifestyles. Every corporate logo becomes a rainbow flag (except in Mohammedan lands, of course). Kellogg’s even released an LGBT-themed cereal (based on Froot Loops, appropriately enough) aimed at children. The rainbow flag flies over government buildings and diplomatic outposts as though proclaiming their conquest by a foreign power.
The gay rights movement of the 1970s won everything it set out to win and more. It now occupies our institutions of government and culture and is using its power to enact retribution on all who previously opposed them.
We are living in the Reconstruction Era of the Culture Wars.
Published in Culture
Maybe so, but they can’t make me listen to Sam Smith. I have no interest in men singing love songs to other men.
My pride colors are Red White and Blue.
Racist….
This is a problem with the activist class. They win, but what becomes the Gay Industrial Complex? They do not become assimilated normals, that must seem so ordinary . . . So, if they can’t find an injustice, they resort to fabricating one.
Yesterday a bike shop employee got all political with me because I had referred to a girls bike as a “girls bike”. How miserable it must be to go through life like this – to have fought and won – and be empty still.
I hope you took your business elsewhere.
I bring the same deep reverence and devotion I bring to Pride Month as Groundhog Day, National Wear Red Day, Read Across America Day, Daylight Saving Time, Doctor’s Day, Cesar Chavez Day, National Library Workers Day, Law Day, Loyalty Day, National Day of Prayer (what are the other ones, again?), National Ordnance Disposal Day, Leif Erikson Day, Talk Like a Pirate Day (oh, wait, that one might not be officially official), Boss’s Day (not the computer game kind), Wright Brothers Day, and so on. If I had known that somebody was going to take Congress seriously, you know, America’s first and most contemptible criminal class, I never would have approved this whole republic idea.
National Ordnance Disposal Day sounds kind of fun, if you dispose of it by setting it off.
Is there there really any other way?
This is a great way to put it . . .
And shoe-horned into all of this is a new federal holiday: “Juneteenth.”
The gay “rights” movement (adoption and marriage) took off using the seed money and activist talent left over from the AIDS fundraising efforts. There was a great moment during 41’s term in office (working from memory because it has long since gone down the Google rabbit hole) when the AIDS activists threw blood at him through the gate to the Kennebunkport estate. 41 said to them, impatiently, “Look, we have spent more on AIDS than we have spent on heart disease or cancer!”
I set up two 501(c)3s for a couple of organizations I belonged to, and the thing that jumped out at me as I worked through the paperwork process was that at every step of the way, through the articles or organization, the bylaws, and finally the numerous organization descriptions I had to write, how exactly the government wanted me to describe the purpose of the organization and our plans for organization dissolution when that purpose had been met. Obviously, the danger of nonprofits’ outliving their usefulness and becoming a menace was on the minds of the people who set up these regulations in the first place. In the case of the first 501(c)3 I completed, I was helping an organization that had started the paperwork but never finished it. We were then looking for large grants, and we had to have the tax-exempt status. But for fifteen years before that, this organization had just bumped along raising money and doing things with very little oversight from the state. There’s little money available in most states to monitor the thousands of registered and unregistered nonprofits.
The lack of oversight is both positive and negative. It’s positive because any time people can get out from under state supervision, it’s a good thing. It protects organizations from the crony-capitalism problems, where old legacy nonprofits control everything and everyone. It’s negative because these groups can go on forever with their stated mission being one thing and their actual activities being something else.
I’ve been waiting thirty years now for an answer to come into my brain for this problem, and I’m still waiting. :-)
At the end of the day, buyer-donor beware, and there’s no government anything that can ever substitute for moral thinking and behavior.
This is where Rush Limbaugh got my attention because he nailed it: when people think they have the higher moral ground, they give themselves permission to do all sorts of evil. That is so apparent in the world of nonprofits, where a lot of this political activism takes place.
The employee must have been young. I would have laughed at him. That design was to accommodate girls wearing skirts. You wouldn’t want them swinging their legs over the seat to mount the bike. I always preferred the more stable boys’ bikes since I didn’t ride in a skirt. I was never offended if they were called boys’ or girls’ bikes.
We Catholics celebrate June as the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. To say that the Catholic Church embraces gays is misleading. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is definitive on the issue of homosexuality:
There are many in the Church (Fr. James Martin, Bishop (soon to be Cardinal) McElroy, Cardinals Cupich and Tobin, etc., etc. who push for the worldly view as you put it. The Church however, embraces the SSA as she does all us other sinners – as children of God called to chastity and repentance.
I agree with the rest of your article.
Remember the 4-step progression of what evil demands: Toleration, Acceptance, Ratification, Participation.
“In California homosexuality is legal. When it becomes mandatory, I’m leaving.” – Bob Hope
It’s using its power to weaken the authority of parents and mentally enslave children. I’m sure people out for revenge play a role. But the main motive isn’t revenge. The main motive is increased social control for a certain class.
The so called cause of L.G.B.T. people was used to increase the social control of a certain class, I think. It’s similar to the way the so called cause of “people of color” is exploited to increase a certain class’s control over society.
That’s because you are sane.
The employee was young. I recently relocated to Southern Oregon and stopped by the shop in Ashland, a college town, and not where I’m living. It has very beautiful neighborhoods and parks, but also ‘hoods of mostly ramshackle buildings that appear to have been made by hippies years ago. Some women dress in absurd outfits. Ecstatic Dancing places. I walked through an amazing farmer’s market with the most over-the-top Diversity. . . bla bla banners I’ve seen. It was almost 100% White – the only exception being an Asian lady selling Kim Chi. I didn’t laugh at the employee (who was otherwise excellent), but the town is going to be terrific for entertainment.
If by “entertainment” you mean watching how ridiculous lefties can be, I guess that’s something. But I wouldn’t want to live within 50 miles of a place like that, and now I don’t.
What a BS holiday. All it was was a Union general in Galveston telling locals the slaves were freed. It had little effect as Texas didn’t even ratify the 13th Amendment until 5 years after it became part of the Constitution . . .
I have my official three-part US government calendar at work and I noticed last week that the 20th is not colored red, to denote federal holidays. The holiday happened at the last minute last year, but there should have been enough time to get the 2022 calendars correct.
Odd how a regional holiday turned into a federal holiday. I think we can lay some of the blame at Shrub’s feet for bringing recognition from Austin to Washington D.C. Then I’m thinking the Democrats wanted to honor the death of the man who set off the summer of mostly peaceful Biden rallies and a new federal holiday is born.
June is college baseball post season month. The only other thing that warrants my attention is D-DAY.
Watch it. It is the new Independence Day destined to take over for the 4th of July.
A decade from now they will most likely view the 4th like Presidents day.
At this point, I am all for making Jan 6 a holiday