Happy Contentment Month
You know you’ve gone a good job with “Pride” when you don’t need it anymore, and can simply enjoy your gay life in America. Yes, there are still people with nasty attitudes about gay people, as there are still people with nasty attitudes about people of color, etc., which means nobody is completely safe. And this includes white people.
A case can be made that “Pride” events that commemorate and celebrate how civil rights for gay people were won continue to be both relevant and essential. We are coming up on a big celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and reminders that making it stick took blood, sweat, and tears, and the risk of life and personal fortune. During the whole month (why?) appropriated for gay pride, we also commemorate the big and costly Normandy Invasion, which led to the liberation of Europe from fascism and an end to threats to our freedom and safety at home. “Freedom isn’t free,” they say, and they’re right. It’s good to remember that people risked losing jobs, and custody of their children, and even their personal safety, to establish the freedom to be gay and walk proudly in the sunshine.
A reminder: the celebration used to be one day, or weekend, and it was called Gay Freedom Day.
This year, there are more and more gay people posting on social media that they’ve had it with what “Pride” has become. It’s not about freedom, not when it’s used to promote a new oppression of gay people by the bully the trans community has become. Here’s a take from the LGB Alliance UK:
“Every Pride season, a familiar narrative appears: LGB people are victims. Things are terrible. Send money.
“The reality is more complicated, and more interesting.
“Britain has some of the strongest legal protections for LGB people in the world. Civil partnerships. Equal marriage. Hate crime legislation. Adoption rights. Employment protection. These were fought for, won, and they’re real.
“What is also real: those protections are being quietly eroded in areas most people don’t notice. LGB-only spaces being legally challenged. Young gay and lesbian people being fast-tracked to medical treatment. The specific needs of gay and bi men – particularly around chemsex – being swallowed into an LGBTQ+ acronym that doesn’t serve them. [Apparently “chemsex” is a culture of indiscriminate drug use to facilitate uninhibited sex, which is just asking for trouble.]
“LGB Alliance isn’t in the business of telling people things are hopeless. We’re in the business of being specific about what’s actually happening and doing something about it.
“That’s a different kind of Pride.”
True dat, as they say. And here’s a devastating analysis from a straight man, Bret Weinstein:
“No, it’s not ‘Pride Month.’ Not for me, and not for millions of others.
“You’re welcome to be proud of whatever you want, in any month you like—because this is America. But what started in 1969 as a rebellion against persecution, morphed into a license for public depravity, and then morphed again into a weapon aimed at families and innocent children. Along the way it went from a day, to a week, and then a month and became official, and thereby effectively mandatory for all.
“Enough!
“If you’re gay and wondering why you are facing resistance now, the answer is that, with few exceptions, most of you didn’t stand up against the expansion and weaponization of ‘pride,’ and the coercion that went with it. In that failure to resist, the gay community compromised any expectation that the rest of us should support ‘pride’ at all, but especially the obscene display of hostility toward civilization and the families of which it is built, and for whom it exists.
“If your hackles are raised by the idea that civilization is about families [duh!], realize that families are how civilizations persist through time [duh! again]. Not everyone needs to form one, but we all must respect and protect them—it is the foundation of what it means to be civilized.
“For the small fraction of gays and lesbians who DID courageously stand up and resist expansion, coercion and the weaponization of ‘Pride,’ I stand with you, and I have all along. But I won’t be celebrating, and I won’t be silent.
“It’s not too late to join the voices of reason and to confront the insanity of what ‘pride’ has become.”
Word, as they say. There are more of us happy we can live our lives and be content, as opposed to making a fetish out of pride, than Mr. Weinstein realizes. In particular, there are more of us opposing our colonization by the increasingly violent trans rights activists. We tend to be more dispersed, whereas Gay, Inc. is large, powerful, and well-funded.
To continue the America 250 theme, we are the militias and the Continental Army facing down the British Empire.
When big organizations achieve their goals, nobody wants to downsize and go home, not when there are well-paying jobs to maintain. They look for new projects to justify their existence, and their passing the hat for funding. Once we achieved marriage equality, which pretty much gives us the opportunity to live lives on a par with our straight neighbors, it was time to pack up and go home.
It was that need to keep the money flowing in so they could keep their positions and salaries that got the trans movement attached to us like a remora. And the puffing up of the “Pride” phenomenon is a good way to keep pride a big business.
Only it’s becoming less and less of one. Corporate funding for pride celebrations is receding, and many are having to strike their tents and go home. This may be in part because of the deconstruction of DEI, taking away the need to make a big display of kissing Big Rainbow’s behind. Should the Supreme Court rule against trans athletes in women’s and girls’ athletics, that will knock a lot of wind out of Big Rainbow’s sails.
Meanwhile, I’m happy to be celebrating contentment instead of pride. It’s a blessing (and thank you!) to be free to live the life that I do. It doesn’t make me special. Just happy.