Against Pride and Against Pride Month

Five years ago, the monumental Obergefell v Hodges case reached its narrow decision, mandating the federal recognition of marriage documents drawn up for pairs of same-sex people engaged in allegedly romantic relationships. Most of us should remember it pretty well. Those that supported it took to the streets waving rainbow flags and loudly proclaiming the message of the sexual revolution: free love, free expression, no consequences, love whom you like. Some of us spent time pouring over the statements by the Justices to see how badly-reasoned the five supporting decisions were. And the rest of the country, more or less ambivalent and ignorant, shrugged their shoulders and acquiesced to the loud mob. Hey, they reasoned, what the gays do in their bedrooms up to them, and if they want to lick the boots of the IRS by getting saddled with the income tax adjustments that come with marriage, they ought to go right ahead.

What they do behind closed doors is none of our business. This is what the gay rights lobby insisted for decades. They insisted this even as they paraded their S&M gimps down the crowded streets of San Francisco, shoulder to shoulder with naked men covered in rainbow body paint and lipstick, distributing beads to children. They insisted this even as they sued private businesses that refused to cater to them on religious and moral grounds. They insisted this as they forced their mistaken beliefs about homosexuality into grade school curriculi across the country.

And it only took four years to go from the seemingly benign acceptance of same-sex “marriage” by the Supreme Court in 2014, to billboards in Times Square, NYC depicting the latest icon of the LGBT sexual revolution: a ten-year-old autistic child named Desmond who dresses in drag and performs for men at gay bars, with lyrics that include soliciting sex from a confused boy. Four years from 2014 to 2018. Four years to go from “we just want to share in the bond of matrimony” to not simply pushing this homosexual ideology on children, but shamelessly using an autistic child to promote it to the general public.

What’s really going on here? Is it actually about homosexuals trying to gain rights and respect by the broader community? Or is it something worse?

Gay Identity

We know that a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, support same-sex sexual relationships, support nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people, and would even support a gay president. We know that if you’re popular enough, attracting ire from the LGBT community could result in getting de-platformed from social media and web-hosting services. And we also know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

We are frequently reminded of the oppression that LGBT individuals face in this country, despite Americans overwhelmingly supporting their causes at a general ratio of two-to-one. We’re told that the law is somehow against them, despite Obergefell passing the Court half a decade ago. And at the root of their feel-good discourse, we’re also told that being gay is something to be proud of. Thus the advocacy of gay pride, lesbian pride, transgender pride, you name it.

Gay rights began their uphill battle in the seventies, riding on the same wave as the sexual revolution that sparked it all. Like the feminists before them, gay advocacy groups framed the fight in terms of identity. Gays can’t help who they are, so it was claimed, and that’s an accurate statement. At a certain level, none of us have a choice in what exactly consists of our essence. However, as is typical of revolutionary movements, they took it a step further than what was true: the inclination toward being sexually attracted to the same sex was, according to them, part of a person’s essence and therefore part of his identity as well. Gayness is an identity.

Even though it’s not, and it never has been. Prior to the revolutionaries of the mid-twentieth century, homosexuality was viewed by western culture as an on-again, off-again tolerated but disordered mark of the elite and the eccentric. Prior to that, during the height of christian civilization, homosexuality was more properly understood and usually only practiced in secrecy. Little tolerance for its proliferation could be found across Europe, and those that advocated for it tended to find themselves at the wrong end of a pitchfork or a bonfire. And of course, before that, during the period of Roman and Greek antiquity, homosexuality was variously portrayed as a decadent sexual taste, an act of domination, or otherwise a frivolous indulgence.

That same-sex attraction forms an identity requires a radically different belief system than the one supplied to us by Thomism and the general teachings of the Church. The Church has little to say on the subject, at least in comparison to what the horn-rimmed, glasses-wearing professor of your local gender studies class would have to say, because the Church recognizes that there is only one sexuality. There is in fact, only one way to have sex, because sex has a specific definition that all advocates of the sexual revolution have done their utmost to erase, ignore, and flee from. Sex refers to the venereal act that usually brings about new offspring. As St. Thomas Aquinas writes:

A sin, in human acts, is that which is against the order of reason. Now the order of reason consists in its ordering everything to its end in a fitting manner. Wherefore it is no sin if one, by the dictate of reason, makes use of certain things in a fitting manner and order for the end to which they are adapted, provided this end be something truly good. Now just as the preservation of the bodily nature of one individual is a true good, so, too, is the preservation of the nature of the human species a very great good. And just as the use of food is directed to the preservation of life in the individual, so is the use of venereal acts directed to the preservation of the whole human race. Hence Augustine says (De Bono Conjug. xvi): “What food is to a man’s well being, such is sexual intercourse to the welfare of the whole human race.” Wherefore just as the use of food can be without sin, if it be taken in due manner and order, as required for the welfare of the body, so also the use of venereal acts can be without sin, provided they be performed in due manner and order, in keeping with the end of human procreation. (Summa Theologiae II-II, 153, 2)

St. Thomas reminds us that sin, with regard to human action, is “that which is against the order of reason,” or in other words, that which goes against the manner by which the things of the world are ordered and intended. There is no sex act that does not bring about children.

On the contrary, what we have the sexual revolutionaries answering this truth with is the following: contraception, advocacy of various forms of fornication, and sodomy. That these things can occur with another person is irrelevant, as the prevailing attitude toward sexual relationships and hook-up culture today is little distinguishable from sessions of mutual self-abuse. The remarkable increase in non-marital cohabitation, in which two people are willing to use each others’ bodies but unwilling to submit themselves to the bonds of matrimony, coupled with the prevalence of internet sites like Tinder, have given rise to an acceptance of what is effectively unpaid prostitution by both women and men.

This is important to keep in mind when understanding how such a thing as a “gay identity” could be constructed. The sexual revolution made several unsubstantiated claims about human sexuality, the main thrust of which built off of the likes of Freud and Kinsey: sexual impulses cannot and should not be controlled, and the human will has no fundamental power over what, who, and how he finds something (not necessarily someone) arousing. From this, we factor in the appropriate amount of materialism, and we arrive at a second point: arousal and attraction are indistinguishable from one another, and sexual attraction is, in effect, all that comprises the notion of love.

This explains how the sexual revolution’s first offensive led directly into its second and now third offensives. The first offensive was the attack on normal, monogamous relationships, and in particular, marriage. In that offensive’s wake we see the standardization of divorce law across the whole country, widespread and de facto assumption of cohabitation prior to marriage, astronomical divorce rates, and the normalization of teenage sexuality in schools—even implicitly promoted by the institution of so-called sexual education classes. The second offensive, gay rights, grows out of this.

Venereal behavior, removed from its proper conjugal context and repurposed through the use of contraception so as to be relegated to “something fun to do that feels good” rather than “something that has a moderately high chance of beginning the next phase of your life”, has no end in sight. Matrimony is the only thing that makes sense of sexuality. Within the confines of marriage, children can be born and raised without nearly the sort of risks that are guaranteed outside of it.

Once venereal behavior has been relegated to a hobby, homosexual behavior becomes easier to define as an alternative sexual practice rather than the gross abuse of the human body that it actually is. With contraception, what would be normal sexual behavior—even within a marriage—becomes sterile, and we know that sterility happens also to be one the defining characteristics of homosexual behavior. Artificial contraception, though overtly used as a means of population control, was wielded by the sexual revolutionaries as a means to undermine the proper ordering of the family and, ultimately, to normalize depraved venereal behavior.

So by the nineteen eighties, homosexuality was already well on its way to normalization. The AIDS epidemic garnered sympathy for a community of people who had already been recognized by their identity as homosexuals. Their venereal behavior had already come to define them as a class of people, and not merely in a social sense, but on the very level of their identity. This is because the second offensive in this fight sought to alter the subject of homosexuality from its behavior—which even in their own terms would ultimately amount to acting out some fetish—to its inclination, the internal desire that such behavior correlated to. You could call yourself a homosexual if you had a strong desire to fornicate with members of your own sex, regardless of whether you actually engaged in that behavior or not. That such an inclination was disordered—as just about any fetish is—was bluntly ignored by the gay community, and kindly ignored by the rest of society.

We can thank this shift in focus, in part, to French post-structuralist Michel Foucault, himself an unrepentant homosexual with an inclination toward sadomasochism that was so strong it came out in his academic work.

Notice, however, that the progression from contraception and divorce, to premarital sex, to renunciation of marriage, to legitimizing homosexuality is a straight line. It’s quite conceivable that sodomy would be normalized even without Foucault’s efforts to re-contextualize homosexuality as an alternative sexual behavior, since the progression of these things all boils down to the redefinition of sex as pleasure and the formulation of morality around consent. If any action that is consented to is perfectly acceptable, then the whole society becomes shaped around the gratification of the appetites—lust being the most difficult to control. As evidenced by the last fifty years, it isn’t long until you find whole communities of men who inflict sexual violence upon one another and have convinced themselves that it’s simply a means of showing their love.

A person trapped within the LGBT narrative has already lost all framework necessary to understand what love is. What gay rights proponents profess to be love is little more than a form of violence inflicted upon each other’s bodies for—presumably—mutual self-abuse. Without getting too deeply into the vulgarities of their sex acts, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand that at the very least, homosexual relations between men always result in a sexual violence being perpetrated by one party and inflicted upon the other. It’s no coincidence that so many of the most vocal supporters of the gay community also openly indulge in sadomasochism through their dress, speech, and public hobbies. The connection isn’t a mere matter of degree, but wholly of category. And it’s also no surprise that all redefinitions of marital relationships—and in deed, sex itself—as intrinsically violent and domineering all come from the pens of queer theory advocates; when your understanding of sex is disordered and violent, you’ll never understand what the sex act really is without a radical change in thinking.

There is no “gay identity” any more than there is a “straight identity.” The LGBT narrative even implicitly admits this, with queer-identifying folk taking up the a self-definition that literally means not normal. When it comes to sexual inclinations, you have those that are ordered and those that are disordered. Sexual behavior operates according to a logos. Those that ignore it have to be LGBT-advocates, even if they don’t consider themselves gay per se. LGBT, with particular emphasis on the T, is the third offensive of the sexual revolution. The first offensive was about fornication, the second was about sodomy, and the third so far has been about the use of language to obfuscate biological realities. Anyone who subscribes to any form of sexual ‘liberation,’ be it even the support of contraceptives, is already embroiled in the LGBT narrative.

Gay Agenda

The big win that legitimized homosexuality, and that marked the end of the second offensive, was the 2014 Supreme Court ruling of Obergefell v Hodges. But amusingly enough, the same-sex marriage catastrophe wasn’t necessarily a victory for the extreme-left sodomites.

As early as the late-80s, queer revolutionary activists were already questioning whether such a thing as “same-sex marriage” was even a good goal to aim for. Some, like Thomas Stoddard, disdained the thought of marriage, despite a long-term cohabitation with his homosexual partner. Despite this, he argued in a 1989 paper entitled “Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry,” that the value which individuals derive from marriage is more or less irrelevant to its social importance. He sites some legal advantages to marriage—again, despite rejecting the institution himself—but dwells more the philosophical and political ramifications that marriage entails. Interestingly, the Church itself is square in his sights when he recognizes what the “moral majority” was of the late-80s:

“Lesbians and gay men are now denied entry to this ‘noble’ and ‘sacred’ institution. The implicit message is this: two men or two women are incapable of achieving such an exalted domestic state. Gay relationships are somehow less significant, less valuable. Such relationships may, from time to time and from couple to couple, give the appearance of a marriage, but they can never be of the same quality or importance.

I resent—indeed, I loathe—that conception of same-sex relationships. And I am convinced that ultimately the only way to overturn it is to remove the barrier to marriage that now limits the freedom of every gay man and lesbian.”

Nowhere in his short paper does he explain why the conception of same-sex relationships as defined by the Church is actually wrong. He only says that he dislikes that the definition is held by both the Church and the moral majority of the country. Whether or not its wrong seems to be beside the point. And as a side note to this, notice also the quotes he holds around the words noble and sacred; marriage, for the homosexual, is not a noble or sacred institution. It’s simply a means toward an end—be that end a practical one, in the sense of modifying inheritance laws or gaining health insurance, as he mentions earlier in his paper, or a more social one, which is the further acceptance of homosexual behavior among the general population.

He continues as he enters into his concluding section when he writes this:

“First, and most basically, the issue is not the desirability of marriage, but rather the desirability of the right to marry. That I think two lesbians or two gay men should be entitled to a marriage license does not mean that I think all gay people should find appropriate partners and exercise the right, should it eventually exist. […] They should, to my mind, unquestionable have the opportunity to marry if they wish and otherwise meet the requirements of the state (like being old enough).”

Again, marriage itself means nothing. Homosexuality, both as a behavior and as an identity, cannot actually be serviced within the conjugal union, as even he implies here. It should be open to them more as a matter of convenience than as a matter of spiritual, romantic, or ontological reality. And notice also how quick he is to skirt the issue of pederasty as he closes the paragraph. Despite wishing for an upheaval in the way the law of 1989 stood regarding the “traditional gender requirements of marriage,” what’s stopping someone from critiquing, say, the traditional age requirements of marriage as well? This isn’t a matter of apples and oranges, this is a matter of which party holds the authority to modify what’s fundamentally moral, and in Stoddard’s case, he’s decided that only the law has such an authority—despite being critical of the law’s stance on homosexual union.

Stoddard’s paper was published alongside one by Paula Ettelbrick, entitled “Since When is Marriage a Path to Liberation?” Fortunately, Google Books has a collection online that makes both of these papers available to read at your convenience.

Ettelbrick, as her title implies, takes the opposite approach. Marriage is a confining institution unfit for any man or woman liberated from the oppressive restrictions of hetero-normative sexual inclinations. At face value, it seems as though she disagrees with the position put forward by Stoddard:

“First, marriage will not liberate us as lesbians and gay men. In fact, it will constrain us, make us more invisible, force our assimilation into the mainstream, and undermine the goals of gay liberation. Second, attaining the right to marry will not transform our society from one that makes narrow, but dramatic distinctions between those who are married and those who are not married to one that respects and encourages choice of relationships and family diversity. Marriage runs contrary to two of the primary goals of the lesbian and gay movement: the affirmation of gay identity and culture; and the validation of any forms of relationships.”

Where Stoddard is seeking to move the mainstream moral opinion to be more sympathetic with homosexuals, and he sees marriage as the means of doing so, Ettelbrick views the possible normalization of marriage within the gay community being something that effectively domesticates homosexuals by bringing their disordered lives into the realm of the neighborly. Ettelbrick, however, has no interest in being neighborly with an institution that she calls a “patriarchal system that looks to ownership, property, and dominance of men over women.”

Ettelbrick’s position is, of course, more radical than Stoddard’s but hardly at odds with it. She calls outright for the dismantling of marriage entirely, supporting the notion of alternative forms of cohabitation and romantic relationships. “Being queer,” she writes, “means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of society.” In her own words:

“The lesbian and gay community has laid the groundwork for revolutionizing society’s views of family. The domestic partnership movement has been an important part of this progress insofar as it validates non-marital relationships. Because it is not limited to sexual or romantic relationships, domestic partnership provides an important opportunity for many who are not related by blood or marriage to claim certain minimal protections.

It is crucial, though, that we avoid the pitfall of framing the push for legal recognition of domestic partners (those who share a primary residence and financial responsibilities with each other) as a stepping stone to marriage. We must keep our eyes on the goals of providing true alternatives to marriage and of radically reordering society’s views of family.”

Like Stoddard, Ettelbrick sees the institution of marriage for what it is: something that stands directly in opposition to the interests of the gay rights movement of the time. Gay revolutionaries sought—and still today seek—the abolition of marriage and the abolition of family, in part because the family follows a greater hierarchical order and from this order certain obligations and moral responsibilities can be derived. But the homosexual revolutionary flees from these responsibilities and seeks to reorganize all of morality in order to make acceptable their own disordered inclinations.

So the Gay agenda, at least as of 1989, can firmly be stated such: matrimonium delenda est! The Obergefell v Hodges ruling was simply one more point along that curve. The only reason to attack marriage is to attack the family itself—and see in both Stoddard’s analysis as well as Ettelbrick’s, the family is really their main target.

The second offensive of the sexual revolution effectively ended with Obergefell. The first offensive targeted chastity by promoting fornication. The second targeted matrimony by promoting sodomy. The third offensive targets the family by promoting pride. The third offensive doesn’t target the mere abstract notion of what a family is, but it targets specifically the most vulnerable and weakest members of any family: children.

We know about the promotion of transgender ideology, and how it’s being pushed on children. We know about the drag queen story hours at libraries, and the public libraries that host drag performances specifically for kids. And we know about the decades-long push to get sexual education forced into the classrooms of younger and younger children. We know all of this, and yet have done basically nothing about it.

We see this month, which is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the annual offense of gay pride celebrated in one parade after another. What we see this month also is the corporate bandwagon flying their own sterilized rainbow flags, promoting disgusting and immoral venereal behavior in their advertisements, and siding with the gay community in products and services which have nothing whatsoever to do with sexual behavior, group identity, or any other aspect of the gay agenda.

It’s bad enough to see the Coca-Cola company unveiling month-long ad campaigns pretending like they care about the plight of LGBT-identifying individuals. It’s bad enough that there’s a pride flag on every other car bumper, every street corner, and every advertisement online. These are part of the cultural landscape and, give it another few weeks, they’ll all be gone, replaced back with the droll corporate ads we’re used to.

But then you see something like this, which was from two years ago. That’s Target’s way of showing their support for the LGBT movement, and yes, some of those pictured are children’s clothes. Stop and think about the implications behind pushing an ideology on children that’s formed around disordered sexual desire and made manifest in improper venereal behavior.

We know where this all leads. Our gay rights activist Ettelbrick said it herself: “Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of society.” This isn’t about same-sex attraction anymore. It’s about whatever you want it to be. Whatever your appetite, whatever your fetish, it doesn’t matter. However depraved, disordered, unspeakable, vile, or numerous your inclinations might be: the word queer is here to define you, and the queer community is here to support you. That abyss is deep and dark and the bottom of it empties out into Hell. It’d just be nice if Hell stayed where it was and wasn’t brought up here to torture the living too prematurely.

The Three Offensives of the Sexual Revolution

Throughout this piece, I have referred to the “offensives” of the revolution. The first, of course, began in the early 1960s and raged up through the seventies. To a degree, it is still alive now in the form of sex education in schools, but that battle has changed somewhat since it was introduced.

The first offensive was a direct attack on chastity, on marriage, and on the common understanding of sex itself. The first offensive’s goals, now that we can see clearly with hindsight, were the legalization and normalization of divorce, the encouragement of premarital cohabitation, and the exploration of alternative venereal practices that did not involve sexual intercourse per se. The first thrust of this offensive was to detach sex from procreation.

The results speak for themselves. Divorce rates, single motherhood, prostitution, unmarried couples, staggering statistics involving premarital sexual partners, general licentiousness, and the widespread availability of pornography all attest to the first offensive’s sweeping victory. As these each became part of the cultural landscape, aided certainly by Hollywood and general television programming throughout the seventies, the second offensive began: an attack on the unity of marriage and the specific normal mode of heterosexual relationships.

Gay rights sought to fully divorce venereal behavior from the sexes of the people involved. Everyone already knew, more or less, that hedonistic indulgence didn’t have to be “properly ordered” in order for physical stimulation to be pleasing. The difference was no one had tried to form a social identity out of the disordered inclinations that gave rise to such indulgences. With the normal means of divorce already in decline, chastity pierced by public fornication, and pornography having eroded the imagination, homosexual union became such an easy pill to swallow that few living within the modern world found ways of refuting it.

The third offensive is, of course, transgender advocacy. This is not merely the divorce of behavior for inclinations, but rather the outright rejection of the physical body itself. Transgender ideology is as confused and contradictory as those who both profess and practice it; for some, gender doesn’t exist as anything real, and is simply a semantic term that holds a social value to it. For others, gender does exist and serves as a sort of sliding scale. Whatever the deal is, transgenderism seeks to abolish the common sense view of the body, and denies the self-evident truths that no one, really, can know what it’s like to be anything other than what they are. Rather than viewing the very real problems of dysphoria and disassociation as intrinsically disordered problems that need spiritual and psychological attention, transgender advocates immediately assume that it’s possible for women to actually be men and vice-versa.

The thing is that transgender ideology only actually affects a handful of people. The broader offensive doesn’t really have to do with the ideology itself, so much as the rhetorical crafting of a narrative that so blatantly denies reality. Notice who the main targets of transgender ideology and education are: it isn’t the normal laypeople who pay their taxes, it’s the kids in schools who are forced to repeat this nonsense back to their teachers or they fail a grade. This third offensive reveals what sexual liberation was about all along: the denial of reality in the effort to atomize society and cut everyone off from one another. It’s fitting that it only reached this stage in an age where social interaction is dominated by the internet and by media.

The Reality

The “Gay Rights” has nothing to do with gays or with rights. We know this now from the progression from gay rights to LGBT rights, to LGBTQ, to LGBTQ+, to whatever other semi-ironic acronyms they want to tack onto the end. We know this because the inclusion of transgender ideology, which effectively denies the structure of gender and even the concept of biological sex, contradicts the very notion that anyone can actually be gay or even straight. As gay rights have grown in acceptance by the general population, the revolutionary character of the movement has necessitated that it shed its appearances as an identitarian movement and move firmly into the realm of one seeking the public sanctioning of a particular set of behaviors.

The steady and deliberate construction of the LGBT paradigm over the last century has been, essentially, an enormous gas-lighting operation to socially engineer a society that had a strong moral and familial foundation into one in which every person is atomized, no one trusts one another, and the impulsive liberal tendencies of individualism infect every aspect of civil society. It’s anarchism on full display, and not a mere anarchy of politics or economy, but one whose roots stretch into each of the cardinal sins and have borne fruit over lust. This is the endgame face of the revolution. There’s nowhere left for the revolution to go. Modernity’s revolutionary character is a perpetual revolt against God and His Church.

According to ancient Hebrew commentaries on Genesis, known as the Midrash, the worldwide deluge from which only Noah and his family was saved was brought about only after nuptial agreements were drawn up between a two men and between a man and a beast:

“R. Huna said in R. Joseph’s name :

The generation of the Flood were not blotted out from the world until they composed nuptial songs¹ in honour of pederasty and bestiality.

¹ Or perhaps: until they wrote marriage deeds for males and beasts — i.e. they fully legalised such practices.” (Genesis Rabbah XXVI.5~6)

The quote here includes pederasty, though other translations seem merely to indicate homosexuality. In either case, we see what’s important to note. The degeneration of Man is easier to spot and easiest to partake in when the cause is sexual vice. We see clearly the direction that the LGBT agenda is headed, and it’s going at full steam. Its doctrines are taught in every public school in the United States. Its narrative is pushed worldwide through UN measures regarding population control and under the guise of health & human services. Our own president has invoked it for future justification in cracking down on third world countries to prohibit so-called homophobia and related offensives. Its iconography and aesthetic is promulgated by nearly every major international corporation whose products and services you probably interact with on a nearly-daily basis.

The sexual revolution is not going to stop when the revolutionaries get what they claim to be after.  They get what they’re after all the time.  It isn’t going to stop, ever.  There is no venereal act that the sexual revolution will decide to omit from its repertoire.

And it’s already gunning for your children.

“But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.” – Matthew 18:6