No one can accuse the promoters of Pride Month of subtlety. When you do a Google search about it, your screen blows up in confetti and rainbow flags. There are pride parades in just about every major city in the country. Major brands honor the LGBTQI+ community with special, rainbow-styled promotions to the extent that it can be difficult to not buy something celebrating Pride. Libraries, baseball teams, celebrities, and public schools all join in on the fun.
But is there really all that much to be proud of?
Health authorities assess that the recent spread of monkeypox can be traced to a May pride event in the Canary Islands that drew 80,000 people, as well as a gay sauna in Madrid. Three cases in Belgium were also linked to a large “fetish festival” in Antwerp, according to event organizers. According to the CDC, “it’s not clear how the people were exposed to monkeypox, but early data suggest that gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men make up a high number of cases.”
The Associated Press cited a senior adviser to the World Health Organization who “described the unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox in developed countries as ‘a random event’ that appears to have been caused by sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe.” Most known cases in Europe have been among men who have sex with men. CNBC noted that “monkeypox appears to be spreading in the [gay and bisexual] community globally.” Even The Atlantic carried an article with the provocative headline: “Gay Men Need a Specific Warning About Monkeypox.”
This isn’t exactly the kind of messaging that aligns with the family-friendly, children-friendly narrative of Pride promoters. Unlike the early days of the radical, avant-garde movement, which “wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian free love,” Pride is now supposed to be associated with bourgeois, family values. As Rod Dreher observes, “This is the dark side of this culture of “freedom” we have created. Monkeypox, anarchy, and the destruction of the human. If you don’t think the legitimization of the sexual exploitation of children isn’t coming next, you are living a fairy tale.”
Speaking of which, that is exactly what the attempts to normalize the trans movement are doing. The now ubiquitous Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) gives trans persons the opportunity to perform borderline pornographic acts in front of young children. DQSH’s own website explicitly says its goal is to “capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” As I noted in an article at The Federalist, these events often involve encouraging young children to “play” with drag queens and their bodies.
Incidents across the country are confirming the connection between DQSH and sexual grooming. The examples we know about include the former president of an organization that served as a sponsor for the Milwaukee Drag Queen Story Hour who was charged with possessing child pornography depicting the sexual abuse of underage boys and the Houston Public Library admitting a registered child sex offender to read to kids in a DQSH event. But it’s not just DQSH: Pride parade participants, liberal corporate media, liberal academics, and even schools have all been seeking to normalize pedophilia.
Add to that the aggressive media and school campaigns to encourage children to explore alternative gender identities, while hiding these programs from parents. The percentage of young Americans who identify as transgender is twenty times higher than that of the baby boomer generation. The number of school-aged children who say they are experiencing gender dysphoria has dramatically increased just in the last decade. As Abigail Shrier documents in her must-read book Irreversible Damage, an entire generation of young American females are being misled by educators and other school officials into pursuing hormone treatment and/or sexual reassignment surgery that have devastating lifelong consequences.
Yet our establishment elites are actively trying to silence voices like Shrier. Her book was removed by booksellers for its “dangerous” content. Ethics and Public Policy Center president Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally was delisted from Amazon, which won’t sell books framing any LGBTQ+ identities as mental illnesses. Many liberals have attempted to cancel and silence author J.K. Rowling because of her comments regarding transgenderism.
Leftist-dominated academia has also evinced an intolerance toward any concern or criticism regarding LGBTQI+ ideology. An LGBTQI+ student group at the University of London a few years ago suggested sending “bigots” to the gulags. Brown University distanced itself from a then-assistant-professor at their School of Public Health whose research discussed the role of social factors in the rise of gender dysphoria, following widespread backlash. When research by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus showed that children of gay parents fared worse than children raised by married, opposite-sex parents, UT Austin initiated “an inquiry to determine whether a formal investigation is needed.” (The university found no plausible grounds for an investigation and closed the inquiry.)
In effect, the LGBTQI+ community and its supporters across all elite institutions—the media, academia, the entertainment industry, woke capitalists, federal agencies—have created an intellectual climate that is fundamentally hostile to free speech and inquiry. Research and literature, no matter how carefully nuanced, that questions these sexual dogmas is immediately and mercilessly impugned for undermining the “progress” of the sexual revolution. For a movement purporting to support diversity and inclusion, the record suggests otherwise.
And it’s not just free speech that is under threat. As Ryan Anderson explained last year, the Equality Act, if passed, would enable the federal government to use the Civil Rights Act as a sword against “any establishment that provides a good, service, or program,” including religious institutions and medical professionals, that refuses to cooperate with the latest dictates of sexual orientation and gender identity. And let’s not forget that in 2019 Democrat Beto O’Rourke, now running for governor in Texas, threatened to remove the tax-exempt status from any religious institution opposed to gay marriage.
Self-destructive hedonism, sexual grooming of children, and an intolerance that seeks to coerce opponents into subjection. These are the kinds of things that define the LGBTQI+ movement. It leads one to wonder: what’s there to be proud of?
