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Pride Month? Seriously?
I don’t understand it. This level of sheer corporate pageantry doesn’t even happen for Black History Month. The US is not a country that undertakes mass PR campaigns celebrating abstract identity groups for an entire month. This seems a bit much for epater la bourgeoisie (the emotional need of certain rich people to constantly shock the sensibilities of the middle class). What is going on?
As a bisexual, I’m expected to think of myself as part of this weird amorphous “LGBT” thing, a category that includes a fantastic number of freaks and weirdos and people I want nothing to do with. Sexual orientation is not the same thing as identity. Seeing sign after sign proclaiming “Pride Month” in every store I go to is surreal. What’s the point?
This almost strikes me as a religious phenomenon. Aside from hardcore pro-binary trans people, most sexual identities are 100% socially constructed. That’s true for queer people, the non-binary, lesbians, and those gay men who have a “sexual identity” (many do not). So is Pride Month just a weird upper-class sexual cult? I don’t know.
Published in General
Who exactly is telling them to do this?
What exactly does this ‘mainstreaming’ entail?
You are confusing Church and State.
The best course is to mainstream homosexuality while at the same time opposing the grooming of children. A free society can chew gum and walk at the same time.
It’s similar to how we deal with heterosexual sex. We don’t argue that if we allow consenting adults to engage in heterosexual sex that children will be groomed to have underage heterosexual sex.
Same for homosexuality: We should mainstream it for consenting adults but prohibit the grooming of children.
The sheer incoherence of this claim has always floored me.
Look, either you accept and follow Catholic moral teaching, or you don’t. If you follow it, you’re only going to sleep with your spouse. Abstinence and fidelity are the safest sex possible.
If you reject Catholic teaching on homosexuality and premarital sex, then go ahead and use a condom while you’re at it. Are there really people out there who, when asked “why didn’t you use a condom when you had a one-night stand with a guy you just met at bar?” would reply “b/c the Catholic Church said it’s a sin!” It just makes no sense whatsoever.
I wish everybody would do their schtick in private. I have no more desire to see hetro perversion as homo perversions. But for some reason we now are forced to watch both under the name of Pride. I crave for a day of modesty again where we kept all this behind closed doors.
The facts seem to be against you on this statement.
Yet there is such a thing as the Man-Boy alliance and they were once a staple of gay pride parades.
Schools actually are promoting
By doing what exactly, and who will be doing this mainstreaming?
There is a difference between saying, “don’t be mean to people who are different”, and “don’t be mean to these specific people who are different…because they’re special, and they are brave [don’t you wish you could be special and brave too?]”.
We shouldn’t automatically disrespect the different, but we shouldn’t automatically respect the different either. Both are a matter of giving up the ability to judge for oneself.
From the Bee: https://babylonbee.com/news/explorers-discover-remote-island-untouched-by-pride-month
Seems to be nice to be special for screwing odd things. I look forward to the day children, gangs, animals and plants are special too.
Oh, so we should “mainstream homosexuality?” Well, it’s already done and look where it brought us. This was inevitable, and those of us who warned about it decades ago were mocked. We should go back to minding our own business and requiring others to mind theirs too.
Sadly that is gone too. It is now celebrate or sanctions.
I think that’ll eventually happen. The current phase is a reaction to when we didn’t mind our own business about this stuff.
Chattel slavery was never acceptable among Judeo-Christians which explains why the practice ended earlier in those cultures and continues to be shunned today as opposed to non-JudeoChristians. This is just a common lie told by Marxists and anti-Christian bigots who point to a small minority of wolves who tried to infiltrate Christian churches while the vast majority defined the anti-slavery movement worldwide.
It is equally ludicrous to think that homosexuality isn’t harmful to those who practice it.
Chattel slavery was only prohibited in the US Constitution in December 1865.
Neither Judaism nor Christianity began in 1865.
So, you are either being dishonest or you just aren’t aware of history.
Homosexuals used to live “in the closet.” They would pretend to be heterosexual, so they would marry people of the opposite sex even though they weren’t attracted to them.
The result was often an unhappy heterosexual who had a spouse who was not attracted him/her. Or just as often the homosexual would just have sex with someone of the same sex on the side, sometimes getting caught.
So, it is much better for society if homosexuals can simply live their lives openly, just like heterosexuals can.
Thank goodness we live in an enlightened age in which all marriages are happy and no one ever gets divorced!
People do get divorced.
But if a homosexual is married to a heterosexual, it’s almost a guarantee of either an unhappy marriage or a divorce.
Why create societal conditions where people can’t have romantic relationships with those they want to have relationships with?
I can’t remember, but are you the guy who wrote an OP about being upset because a waitress thought your friend was your partner?
Wow. The pro-homosexual fists are flying now.
I think Zafar directed his comment at Ryan, not me.
Oh. Maybe I should delete the comment.
It was to Ryan and it’s an honest question. I remember an OP like that – I think it was written by Ryan but I could be wrong.
Edited to add:
I remember thinking: another straight man obsessed with gay booty, it’s a sad world….
@Zafar, as you know, I’ve always been a supporter gay and lesbian people, am related to a few and friends with many more. I argued (at length! Vociferously!) in these pages on behalf of same sex marriage, changing few minds but at least learning a lot about why kind, tolerant, normal, smart people might object, whether to SSM itself, or specifically to the Obergefeld decision.
Okay. I’ve established my bona fides.
Honest question: I find myself whether the christian conservatives among us were correct when they predicted —as they did—that same sex marriage, tolerance, acceptance and normalization of the lives and desires of gays and lesbians would lead, inevitably, to enforced normalization, endorsement and celebration of just about anything and everything that human beings get up to.
Gays and lesbians used to be “un-normal,” that is, persons with alternative lifestyles. But homosexuals and lesbians did form attachments and create families whose basic outlines were recognizably akin to, if not quite identical to, the relationships formed by heterosexuals.
My basic argument for SSM was not emotional but practical: Societies construct themselves around sexual pair bonds. If two men or two women form a potentially permanent relationship that involves not merely desire but duty, mutual obligation and responsibility, it makes sense to reinforce that commitment through the reward of social recognition.
My hope, foolish though it might have seemed to some, was that we would move toward marriage being, once again, the normal adult state for (almost) everyone including the gay or lesbian minority.
But that is not what seems to be happening. Instead, we are being forced to learn of (and celebrate) “identities” formed around mere habits or transient peccadillos that, because they imply nothing whatever about the durability or reliability of one’s relationships, are none of anyone’s business.
If a drowning victim’s “loved one” arrives at the lakeshore, I do need to know whether he is the drowned person’s dad, husband, boyfriend or college roommate.
I do not need to know whether the drowned person and the loved one prefer beer to wine, share a passion for Dungeons and Dragons or hope to visit Vegas. I definitely don’t need to know that their intimate life includes dressing up in bunny suit and hopping around the backyard every Wednesday night, and yet this—not the D&D, even!—is claimed now to be “identity.”
I know that some gays and lesbians find all of this stupid and frankly demeaning: They have no interest in sharing “PRIDE” with a bunch of people who are basically heteros with boring fetishes.
@grannydude, you have been absolutely en fuego lately.
Granny Dude – the question has moved from ‘why’ to ‘why not’. I think we will settle down in a bit.
Do you see—as I do?—a lot of damage being done along the way?
It isn’t so front and centre here in Australia. I’m not feeling the immediacy of it?
Ah. It feels pretty freakin’ front-and-center here, even in Maine. In the long run, I’m inclined to agree that this stuff is just too dumb to endure. As @HenryRacette has said, there really are big differences between all the realities being shoe-horned into the Alphabet-People camp. A gay man is not the same as a trans-man is not the same as a trans-woman is not the same as a furry is not the same as a dreamsexual (apparently that’s a thing: Is it just me, or shouldn’t we shorten it to “dreamsicle?”).
Having said that, though, I see two potential problems. One is that the LGB movement is completely discredited, as more and more heterosexual people who would otherwise be sympathetic get fed up and want nothing to do with what looks like a hot mess (and not in a good way). The other is that we return to the ordinary tolerance and respect that the original LGB movement was asking for.
I remember giving a speech/sermon in which I talked about how marriage, once bestowed, had the almost magical power to place sexual activity beyond the business or, indeed, the interest of others. Before I was married, my grandmother felt that she had the right to interest herself in whether or not my relationship with my then-boyfriend and future husband: She wouldn’t let us stay in the same room when we visited. After we were married…she no longer cared. I don’t mean that we had permission. I mean that she literally lost interest. We were married and therefore—thank God!— completely uninteresting. When, swiftly and inevitably, I became pregnant, no one seemed even slightly concerned with how that had happened. Certainly no one wanted to know whether either of us felt we conformed 100% to gender norms, or had any interest in dressing up in latex.
This was the gift that marriage might bestow on gay couples, whose sex lives were, pre-Obergefels, subject to permanent prurient interest and moral inquiry. Get married, and no one cares anymore.
Why, then, post-Obergefels, are all these silly fetishes, whims, pointless and embarassing perversions suddenly being advertised? Why are college or even high school students asked to puzzle out whether they might be attracted to boys, girls, trans-boys, femme-girls, butch girls, cougars, Daddies or even an unusually shapely mango? —-and, truly, what high school boy isn’t pansexual?
I am one of those “conservative Christians” who thinks homosexuality needs to be shoved back into the closet because its “normalcy” is harming people.
There is I believe still no evidence that homosexuality has any basis in biology. There is a lot of correlation between the experience people have as children and later identification as homosexual. Most of today’s “acceptance” and celebration of deviant sexual appetites such as homosexuality is based on an assumption that there is a clear and unbreachable chasm between being sexually attracted to persons of the opposite sex and being sexually attracted to persons of the same sex. But, given the curiosity and experimentations of children and youth, it appears to me that a non-trivial number of children and youth could end up on either side of that chasm based largely on what they experience as “normal.” The wide presentation of homosexuality as “normal” has probably pushed a large number of people into adopting deviant sexual preferences as their own rather than normal development into normal sexual preferences. I suspect many of them later wonder why they do not find those deviant preferences satisfying.
Reports are that huge percentages of the current teen and young adult population think homosexuality is far more common than it occurs naturally. They think 25 – 40 % of the population is homosexual. I can see why they would have such a distorted view from watching modern media. And I think that misconception causes them to adopt deviancy for themselves even if it turns out not to be satisfying.
We need to consider the possibility that “acceptance” and “normalizing” deviant sexual preferences is influencing people to adopt deviant sexual preferences that in the end harm them.
What sort of harms do you think result from a woman enjoying a romantic relationship with another woman? Let’s assume that both women are at least 18 years old. Can you explain what it is one should be concerned about?
FWIW I still haven’t changed my mind: I think after Roe falls, Obergefeld is the next absurd and unconstitutional SCOTUS ruling we ought to target for reversal.