What's the problem with pride?

In recent years, few things have been afforded the place in public culture — in terms of high calendar events and the communal expression of “our values” — as pride, the idea that we must all express our enthusiastic support for gay and LGBT people, both in an increasingly extended pride season and just in general. In reality, this is a horrible thing, for several reasons, and you're not a bigot for thinking so.

Let's start with something a lot of people may already have bristled at: how irritating it is to be subjected to this increasingly ubiquitous pride propaganda. What was once confined to a single parade became pride month and has now taken over the entire calendar. It's difficult to convey the full scale of it; the following graphic contains a small sample.

Most people have a sense for these things, whether they really see the whole picture or not. Yes, it's not just your imagination, it's propaganda, in every sense of the word. It's networks of progressive activists and corrupted institutions lording over society more intensely than any centrally planned totalitarian state dreamed up in fiction. It's annoying, as being subjected to any propaganda is, because: it's there to work you, you're just a subject, and your feelings are immaterial.

So what's the problem? That's one objection you'll see raised. What's wrong with being “inclusive” and “welcoming” to other people? Well for one thing, that “tolerance” isn't tolerant at all. It's, you better accept this, or else. The threat is a key part. The system cannot accept defiance on this. They can't declare these to be society's highest moral values and then have people openly challenge that. Like most progressive ideas, the logic of it and the benefits of its imposition (the whole rest of the population is being constrained to benefit LGBTs who make up a small minority) cannot withstand scrutiny. That's why you're strictly forbidden from even talking about these things, under threat of hard cancellation (i.e. loss of employment, the ending of one's career, etc.). Those seas of pride flags flying over city streets and important landmarks, they represent just that threat.

There's much more though. Let's just say that there are some unfortunate transitions taking place. The way progressives frame things is that all these major changes you've seen in society are the result of the correction of past inequities in power: whereas straight white men (in various combinations) unjustly held power before, society is overcoming that. There's a line that's popular in certain parts of the Internet that comes to mind here: “The woke are more correct than the mainstream.” They're not wrong to see a hand-off of power from one group of people to another, it's just from normal people to the insane. Now instead of celebrating the sort of things societies have always celebrated — their particular traditions, cultural/religious holidays, and greatest people — it's free sex and every last sexual perversion.

We've suffered real harm and injustice from this too. Power is of course known for conferring benefits on the holder and victimizing those without. You would expect the people who acquire great power to abuse it. One such example is current: Monkeypox and the huge double standard there's been between the handling of it and Covid. For Covid we were locked indoors for two years and people were widely mocked for just getting it — and that's a highly transmissible virus that proved to be next to impossible to avoid for those who live around or work with other people — while monkeypox is literally being spread through orgies and the best the authorities can muster is to meekly request that gay men have fewer sexual partners. It's not so different from what happened with AIDS, though that's a whole other story. Pride celebrates all that, and strictly condemns any questioning of it as “homophobic,” by definition.

People have been lied to, believing as they've been told that politics is not a zero-sum game, that as society improves it gets better for everyone. That's nonsense. Gay marriage, when its proponents had to sell it to a skeptical public, was often framed as being about no more than doing away with the government somehow discriminating against gays by only recognizing heterosexual marriages, but given their status as a vulnerable minority, or in progressive terminology, “marginalized” people — they remain a small minority of the population and anti-gay attitudes are natural and common, especially among populations relatively untouched by progressive propaganda — it always meant there'd be extensive rules and restrictions imposed on everyone else. It's not at all surprising that those people having gained power have made use of it in all areas of life. They have clear incentive to do so.

One of the best-known victims of this new legal regime is the Colorado wedding cake baker subjected to years of legal proceedings for refusing to make the things demanded of him by people who make little effort to hide the fact they're activists doing it just to harass him for having defied them. This isn't such a novel violation of our rights too, it's just civil rights law extended from race to sexual orientation. When progressives point this out their hope is that the powerful taboos around race scare people off from questioning any of this, but the wedding cake baker's case doesn't at all resemble the popular narrative on racial discrimination of poor blacks being banned from staying at hotels and eating at diners while traveling in the South. It's LGBT activists clearly going way out of their way to destroy a rare person willing to stand up to them. Our rights matter, both freedom of expression (which includes the right to not be forced to say things against our will) and freedom of association (a long-dead right in the modern West, though no less important). Pride says they don't, that they should be supplanted by the “rights” of LGBTs, which just means that their interests and concerns be served in all cases, at the expense of everyone else.

It's not just businesses affected too. One of the more obvious targets of all this is religion, given the fact the religious have generally offered up the most resistance to the LGBT agenda (because it violates widely accepted, long-held Christian doctrine). Just think, what does it mean if the most standard of religious beliefs come to be considered beyond the pale because they're now “discriminatory”? It means that your religion has been declared unacceptable. Many churches and much of their congregations will do what they're told and tweak their beliefs to make them politically correct, but that's not really religion, that's just progressivism; others will be scared off religion due to the shame. So goes independent religion in any sense. It's not surprising that faith is collapsing under this regime.

While you'd expect people to sympathize with the death of religion, far fewer will care about another related effect: the death of conservatism/opposition to the left in any significant sense. It goes for the same reason as religion: if it's “hatred” to disagree with any aspect of progressive social policy, what else is there to disagree on? Pretty much just taxes, foreign policy, and a handful of economic issues, leading to the conservatism that remains being defined solely by pro-business and hawkish foreign policy concerns. That's not democracy in any sense — which is of course an outcome they want, as they quite naturally wish to eliminate all threats to their agenda, as people do. Pride says that we should celebrate our own disenfranchisement. That's a slap in the face.

So far we've avoided what's probably the most popularly controversial aspect of the LGBT agenda: the trans issue. It is LGB T after all. While the gay agenda has come to be fairly widely accepted by the general public and even found considerable acceptance within mainstream conservatism (it's more like an offer was made that they couldn't refuse), many prominent liberals even have objected to the trans stuff. There are so many objections to the trans agenda it deserves its own article. Briefly, it means the forced acceptance of absurdities like that biological men with penises who have gender dysphoria should be totally accepted as women, including the right to make girls uncomfortable in change rooms and play on women's sports teams while we all ignore the obvious biological advantages they have. It means the effective erasure of women, and the whole idea of the sex binary, a billion-year-old, fundamental fact of life on this planet. These aren't the first absurdities the public has been forced to accept in service of the LGBT agenda (the idea of same-sex marriage was widely thought to be absurd before it was forced on the public) but it's involved so many blatant examples it's impossible to ignore. Again, this is what pride celebrates.

So to answer the original question, what's the problem with pride? All of this is. Pride is a very public, state-backed celebration of all the above. It's overwhelming propaganda meant to normalize LGBT behaviors and their agenda, and to intimidate those who dissent. I don't like being subjected to this sort of dystopian propaganda regime, seeing control of society handed over to extreme degenerates, having my freedom curtailed, seeing religion destroyed, being disenfranchised, or forced to accept absurdities. All of those things and more are reason enough to take issue with pride in any case and especially with it being afforded the place it's been given in liberal societies today.