Pride Month is sterile

In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy introduces one of his main characters with a not-so-subtle dig at the liberal media and their devotees. We first meet Stepan Arkadyevitch as a man who “took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority.” Then comes Tolstoy’s broadside: “And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them.”

I don’t think I’ve encountered a better description of how cultural morality works today. We’re stuck in an echo chamber with a feedback loop between the media and the majority that is so deafening, it is shaking the foundations of human society.

But for those who, like Tolstoy’s Arkadyevitch, hold views firmly in line with the majority, it may be time to adjust. Consider this recent headline: “Americans Are Becoming Less Accepting of Same-Sex Relationships, Poll Shows.” As reported by Newsweek, Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey shows that across the political spectrum, Americans are becoming less convinced of the morality of same-sex relationships.

According to Gallup, from 2022 to 2023, the percentage of Republicans who consider same-sex relations morally acceptable has dropped from 56 to 41 percent, while approval among Democrats has dropped from 85 to 79 percent. Only independents have increased support, with 73 percent approving same-sex relations, up from 72 percent a year ago.

Taking a step back, the big picture is statistically significant: the past year has seen overall acceptance of same-sex relations in America drop from 71 to 64 percent—a full seven percentage points and larger than any other change in American values and beliefs polled by Gallup.

How can this shift be explained? Up front we should acknowledge there are several factors that shape the morality of a nation, and the most significant are spiritual and not immediately measurable. But there may be some explanations that offer at least some encouragement.

The first factor that may be influencing changing attitudes on same-sex relations in America is what we might call “Pride fatigue.” Now that June is over, many of us are more than ready for our local coffee shops, big-box stores, and governments to go back to attending to their raison d’etre: serving coffee, selling goods, punishing evil and rewarding good—not shilling for a small minority’s sexual preferences.

And LGBTQ activists may have overplayed their hand. As rainbow flags fly over increasingly more disruptive and deviant trends—from Drag Queen Story Hour at the neighborhood library, to coerced speech on preferred-pronouns in the workplace—it’s become nearly impossible to keep up with the revolution.

And while more Americans are waking up to the twisted worldview of transgender ideology, perhaps they are also seeing the logical, moral, and most importantly theological connections underneath the ongoing sexual revolution. That’s a revolution that has given us men receiving awards for winning swimming competitions against women, Supreme Court justices refusing to say what a woman is, and Target selling chest-binders and tuck-friendly swimwear to kids. Not only is it exhausting, it has all become more patently absurd, and Americans may now be waking up.

But there may be another factor that explains Americans’ shifting attitudes on same-sex relations. America’s birthrate is dismally bad. In 2020, it reached an all-time low of 1.64. Keep in mind that the replacement birthrate is 2.1. Apart from immigration, America’s population would be in a death spiral. How might this explain changing morality? It turns out, much to the chagrin of strategists for the Democratic Party, many immigrants from Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia hold more traditional views on gender and sexuality than liberal Americans.

But there is also another demographic explanation: LGBTQ ideology is inherently sterile. Homosexual relations are naturally infertile. Transgender surgeries do irreversible damage to one’s reproductive capacities. What this means is that the vast majority of those who identity as LGBTQ are not reproducing. They are not replacing themselves—indeed, many of them cannot or will not. But conservatives who hold traditional morality can, and they are. The statistics show that progressives who are morally aligned with LGBTQ activists are having fewer kids than their conservative counterparts. In other words, the future belongs to the fecund, and as Christians obey the creation mandate and have children brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, we might expect the moral acceptance of same-sex relations to continue to fall.

One of the best lines in the ’90’s blockbuster movie Jurassic Park is this: “Life finds a way.” And it does. Nature reveals God’s complementary design for the propagation of the species. Pride month can’t change that.