Humbled Pride

Is Pride having a fall? The relative lack of enthusiasm for this year’s Pride month has a lot of people wondering. There were early signs of trouble even before the holiest month for sexual revolutionaries began. In Boise, Idaho, the “Pride Season Kickoff” event scheduled for June 6 was canceled due to insufficient attendance, despite claims of “strong online enthusiasm.”

But it wasn’t just in red states where Pride was being humbled. Seattle Pride was projecting a $350,000 budget deficit due to a decline in corporate sponsorships. This shortfall amounts to nearly a quarter of the organization's annual operating budget. Executive Director Patti Hearn said their decline in financial commitments by major corporate sponsors is consistent with a broader trend of companies scaling back their support for LGBTQ initiatives.

The decline in support continued when Pride month began. Many companies that, as recently as 2023, would use a Pride-themed logo for their online branding, no longer do. That list includes LinkedIn, YouTube, Mastercard, Spotify, Lyft, Hewlett Packard, Coca Cola, and IBM.

Corporate America’s muted enthusiasm for Pride month may be fear of becoming the next Bud Light or Target, two brands now associated as much with suicidal wokeness as they are with the products they offer for sale to the public. Bud Light’s decision to have a man pretending to be a woman represent their product to the NASCAR crowd was hilariously tone-deaf, but it also resulted in a sales decline of nearly 30%. Target’s decision to market tuck swimsuits to children led to boycotts, accusations of grooming, a 15% drop in the stock price, and a market capitalization decline of over $10 billion. No one else in corporate America is looking to get on that ride.

So, despite the rhetoric in recent years about social justice, doing the work, and amplifying marginalized voices, all the corporate virtue signaling may have been about dollar signs not convictions after all.

If corporate America is simply listening to the market, their declining enthusiasm for Pride month may be an indicator of the public’s buyer’s remorse in their arrangement with the sexual revolution. A Gallup survey from May found that support for same-sex marriage has declined 14 points among Republicans in only three years. While a majority of the public still supports it generally, that’s a notable change. But perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising because what the public has received is not what we were promised.

We were told redefining marriage was a matter of fairness and decency, and a lot of people fell for it. People with moral objections to same-sex marriage supported it because they thought it was the kind and fair thing to do. But the sexual revolutionaries did not offer the tolerance they demanded. The moment they felt a sense of cultural dominance, they responded with speech codes, lawsuits against churches, and attempts to ruin the lives and businesses of anyone who expressed a contrary view.  

They insisted it wouldn’t affect anyone other than the loving, same-sex couples who would be removed from second-class citizenship status. We signed up for consenting adults being free to do whatever they wanted in their bedroom, but now drag queens are performing in front of 6-year-olds, there’s cartoon porn in the school library, boys are standing atop the podium at girl’s track and field events, and adults are getting rich by cutting off the genitals of children and claiming it’s necessary for the child’s mental health. This is not what was promised and it’s not what people want.

The phrase, “easy come, easy go” seems to apply. The sexual revolution came to power at a dizzying pace—so quickly, in fact, that you might say the public really didn’t understand what it was getting into. If a mood convinced the public to lend moral support to the sexual revolution, it’s not hard to imagine how a different mood will convince them not to. And now that we have a lot more information about what “love is love” actually means, the mood has changed. This may be just the beginning of “easy go.”