Muted Pride?

As June arrives once more, so does Pride month. Veterans have a day. Martin Luther King Jr. has a day. The Pilgrim Fathers have a long weekend. The LGBTQ community has an entire month.

How a society marks time reflects what it thinks is important. And the 30-day allowance given to Pride is no exception. It is clearly considered very important indeed—30 times more so than MLK, although this does make somewhat implausible the claim that the LGBTQ community is somehow marginalized. English ex-pats like myself don’t even have a lunch hour dedicated to our contribution to the USA, though we did give America the ideas contained in the Magna Carta, the accent for myriad Hollywood villains, and Davy Jones of The Monkees. We are the marginalized ones, it seems.

But seriously, Pride month has become over the years a reminder to many Christians that we are strangers in an increasingly strange land. Values such as sexual continence, public modesty, and the need to protect children from garish displays of promiscuity have been in short supply for many years, and Pride month exemplifies that.

Yet there does seem to have been a shift. Three years ago, I was in Toronto in June. The Pride flag was everywhere, far more visible than that of Canada itself. The same was true when a week or two later I walked through Philadelphia. Any visitor from another planet could have been forgiven for thinking it was the values of the LGBTQ community that provided the unifying principle of the culture, not some shared national narrative. And yet in the two years since, the month’s sexual radicalism seems to have become much more muted.

One reason is likely the fact that the T, the trans issue, was always a step too far. It flew in the face of common sense, and it intruded into everyone’s lives in ways that gay marriage did not. The experiences of Target and Budweiser revealed the public relations problem. People who had no objection to two men living together in a sexual relationship might still have very strong opinions about their daughter’s privacy being compromised, sports being reduced to nonsense by third-rate male swimmers defeating top female competitors, and male rapists being allowed in women’s prisons like children given a free-hand in the candy store. Add to that the way in which the issue has been used to attack parental rights, and the presence of the T in the Pride alliance became a terrible public relations liability.

Whether the trend of Pride month being more low-key and less ubiquitous continues remains to be seen. We can only hope that it does so. But as Christians we must also ask whether some of this is due to developments that are less encouraging than a dose of sanity on the trans issue. It may well be that the sound and fury is dying down because so much of that which it was intended to achieve has been internalized by our culture.

Gay marriage did not destroy the world as we know it, but it did not do so because marriage had been destroyed long ago with the advent of no-fault divorce. That turned the institution into a sentimental bond, not a relationship designed for both companionship and procreation. It downgraded children, making them peripheral to any normative understanding of the marital union. And that made the necessarily sterile notion of gay marriage entirely plausible. It also reinforced the acceptability, even desirability, of IVF and surrogacy. All of these things are now normalized, and all raise very serious challenges for Christians.

As we head into Pride month, we can hope this year will continue the trend of the whole thing becoming more low-key. A less pornified public square benefits us all. But if it does so, it would be premature to assume that this is unmitigated good news. It might simply indicate that so much of Pride’s ambitions have become an intuitive part of our culture and that orthodox Christian attitudes are even more outlandish than they were before.