On Pride Month, the nature of Pride, and compelling opinions.
The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind.
G. K. Chesterton, in ‘On Certain Modern Writers’.
This is "Pride Month".
I wasn't going to comment it at all, for a variety of reasons, part of which are cowardly. But because that is in fact cowardly, I'm commenting on it now.
Indeed, the fact that I was disinclined to post on it shows something. Over the span of fifteen or so years, roughly dating to the Obergefell decision to the present date, the nation went from agreeing to tolerate a small minority of people who exhibit was largely regarded as a deeply peculiar unnatural trait, to one in which that particular trait is now so mild in comparison to what is now forced upon the population that it doesn't even make the charts. That is, no matter what you may think of it, same sex attraction, which has in no means ever reached the point where actual science has determined that its origins are not environmental and psychological, rather than organic, is now fully accepted, both culturally and by force, as dictated by nature, and we're now being forced to accept that surgically and chemically mutilating minors is health care.
If you don't agree with any aspect of that for any reason, you will be subject to open hostility and repression. You will, moreover, be tagged something like "homophobic", a word which in strict translation means "afraid of man", but is supposed to imply fear of anything other than the biological norm in regard to sex even if, in reality, your actual view is that the science doesn't back something that only a tiny, but growing, number of mostly European culture people exhibit. Indeed, only social science, and really only social science in North America and Europe, and nations heavily influenced by European culture, are of the view that any of this is normal. The fact that European cultured people are of the view that this is now a culturally and scientifically settled question shows, therefore, an interesting retention of cultural colonialism that is no supposedly passé.
That alone is an interesting example of the evolution, and decay, of Western Society. We are now at the point where most of the real fundamentals of Western Society, including an appreciation of its intellectual history and the profound influence of Christianity upon it are abhorred in the benighted, enlightened, and well off classes, as a rule, but in regard to left wing theory, we are arrogant enough to demand it be accepted by the whole globe.
A lot of that decay set in eons ago, and indeed, as we noted the other day, the rot really started to set in on October 31, 1517, when a psychologically troubled misplaced Augustinian German monk determined that he knew better than anyone else on certain topics and struck a blow for radical individuality. LGBTQIAP2S+? comes directly from that day, and from that individual, in part, although he'd no doubt be horrified, maybe, by the development.
Pride Month is also an example of cultural colonialism. It's highly akin to the late 18th, early 19th Century Reservation System pushed on Native Americans, which had the idea that Native Americans would become Protestant farmers.* It didn't matter if they didn't want to become either, they were going to no matter what, and no matter what it took to get that result, right down to separating children from parents, was okay.
It's interesting to note that the widespread result instead was cultural destruction, crime and chemical dependency. . . all of which are on the rise in the wider culture now.
Quite a few Natives long attempted to keep on some aspect of the old life, and of course it was never fully given up, even to the present day. But the element of force was attempted for a very long time.
Prime Month has that aspect. No matter what your view on the scientific authenticity of the concept that young women on the spectrum can decide in their mid-teens that they want their boobs removed and to receive chemical injections, something that has Sweden, Finland and the United Kingdom all now ban and which Norway is getting set to on the basis that it is not evidence based, you are going to have to socially choke it down.** It's better, society asserts, that you shut up and agree with what is contrary to nature and science and allow the mutilations to continue than to voice any opinion in opposition to it on any basis whatsoever.
Custer, after all, was a hero, right? He was putting those Indians back on the Reservation for their own good.
But what about the concept of "pride" itself?
Designating something a "month", if it receives some sort of official recognition, is a way of officially blessing what the declaration stands for. It's not clear when it really got started, but in some ways it's both less than and more than declaring something to be a day. I haven't researched what the first "month" in honor of something was, but it might be Black History Month, which had its origin in 1926 with an African American History Week. Kent State proposed Black History Month in 1970, and it's grown since then.
Black History Month has to be regarded as fairly successful, although frankly its more of a way for educators to focus on the contributions of African Americans to American history than anything else, although official organs of the government recognize it. Its success lead to Women's History Month, which is March. Black History Month is February. November became Native American History Month under President George Bush, which is also Aviation History Month.
The interesting thing of the focus of all of those months is their focus on history. The thought was that the history of the group may have been forgotten or inaccurate, and this was a chance to redress it, although as Aviation History Month shows, this can devolve into a focus on what is a specialized topic or interest. Over time, the latter has really taken hold.
For example, take January for the United States:
- National Codependency Awareness Month
- National Mentoring Month
- National Healthy Weight Awareness Month
- Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month
- Stalking Awareness Month
- Veganuary
Hmmmm.
"Pride Month" fits into the latter category, but its an attempt to recall the former. In both instances, conceptually, its problematic.
Pride does not go before a fall. Pride is a fall, in the instant understanding of all the intelligent who see it.
G. K. Chesterton.
Pride itself is problematic.
The online Oxford Dictionary defines pride as follows:
- a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired."the team was bursting with pride after recording a sensational victory"
- 2.
- be especially proud of (a particular quality or skill)."she'd always prided herself on her ability to deal with a crisis"
Clearly the first definition doesn't make sense here, although it's probably the one that was in mind, maybe, when June was declared Pride Month. LGBTQ+ don't claim to have achieved that status. Perhaps they're celebrating the things that people who fit into that category, which isn't a real category as it's far too broad, have achieved. Maybe the second category makes more sense, actually.
Indeed, what I really think Pride Month is supposed to refer to is absence of shame, which isn't the same thing. People have certainly been shamed for things in the past that they should not have been, and a same-sex attraction (which is now only a limited part of this broad category) is one such thing. Pride Month was probably really intended to be an absence of shame month, so to speak.
The problem there is It's gone from "don't shame", which is related to "tolerate", to accept.
It's one thing not to be ashamed. A person can have attributes and conditions of all types that others regard with some element of disdain, which they are not ashamed of, or should not be ashamed of. I'd wager that almost everyone has felt this at some point in time. When I was a kid, I was ashamed that I had asthma, and I still somewhat am. Most people probably wouldn't be, but I was. I still keep it pretty much to myself, although it rarely afflicts me know.
I wouldn't ever, however, consent to being "proud" of having asthma.
As an adult, I've been curious subject to an element of shame about having chosen to be a lawyer, which is a really strange personality quirk for somebody who has been successful at it. The fact that it bothers me, bothers me. My mother was quite proud of it, but I hated it whenever she told somebody that. For that matter, I hate it when somebody asks me "what do you do?", which is a routine question for men to receive. I recall being at a small local bar once with a coworker, who is immensely proud of being a lawyer, when he answered that immediate upon being questioned with an enthusiastic "We're lawyers!".
Oh, great.
More on that, at some other time.
There are some things I'm genuinely proud of, and there are others I'm genuinely ashamed of. I'm not going to publish either of those here, however.
To be ashamed, of course, means to have a sense of shame. Part of the experiment of modern life has been to banish shame, and that's one of the tragedies of the modern world. There are things that people should be ashamed of, including sexual things, which Pride Month is on, in a fashion. People who cheat on their spouses, have "sexual addiction", delve in pornography and prostitution, those being two sides of the same coin, and the like should in fact be ashamed. Some of those people have fallen so deeply into those things that they have a very hard time getting out of them, but hat doesn't mean that they shouldn't be ashamed. Their shame should be, and if properly ordered is, their motivator, in part.
Which brings us back to the LGBTQ+ topic.
A major problem here, from the onset, is that this entire area when from homosexuality, which doesn't even appear to really be the same in men and women, to being all sexual abnormalities. From there, it's become an outright assault on normality, and that's the problem with the month. It's gone from "accept that there are people who have same sex attraction" to "nobody is really heterosexual so you must join us".
And that's both scientifically invalid and wrong.
Starting off with the broad nature of the definition, it should be obvious that this is a problem in and of itself. If every sexually deviation from the mean fits into a category, and the category must be not only tolerated but celebrated, then there is no bar whatsoever to any sexual deviation.
Put more bluntly, if you have to accept transgenderism as real and worthy of celebration, you have to accept child molestation the same way, and there's no bar to that which is anything more than sophistry.
Of course, we all know that's wrong, except for a tiny number of pedophiles who argue just what I noted. That brings you to the flip side. If pedophiles are mentally ill, then you can have a departure from the mean, which is a mental illness.
That is in fact the reality of it. The question then becomes what is a mental illness and what isn't. . . assuming that any of these departures from the mean aren't.
Well, the ones that pretty clearly aren't always are the old male/female ones where somebody is a bad actor. That is, men who screw every woman that will let them, and women who behave the same way. That's bad behavior, and wrong. It's also now being "polyamorous".
Having said that, according to modern psychology, which is often wrong, this may be sexual addiction, which is a mental illness.
Some of the categories in the LBGTQ+ group are, quite obviously, mental illnesses. Transgenderism definitely is. Others may simply be strong compulsions, or even weak ones. For those, Pride Month serves to pigeonhole people where they wouldn't otherwise go, and may not wish to.
Everyone has known some people with some sexual deviation compulsions. Some of them hold them strongly, and others not very much. The interesting thing, however, is that until the Obergefell era, many simply had that as an aspect of their personality, with many of them emphasizing it hardly at all. Only the most aggressive, who are often those who demonstrated a pronounced deviation, were really aggressive about it. Those people are now, however, driving the bus and the entire culture.
Part of that bus driving is mowing down anyone who won't get on, and that in part is serving to drive the nation apart. Pride Month has been co-opted, or perhaps always served, to force accepting every sexual deviation down the throats of everyone else. If you don't believe that it's all natural, you are liable to intellectual assault.
It's the racist eugenics of our era.
From Government websites from every branch of the government all the way to corporations are forcing the agenda. As you can't force the unnatural on everyone indefinitely, it will fail, but it might fail in destructive ways.
It's also in advertising, which is interesting in that this is the second time in fifty years that advertising has gone down this road. The first time was in the 1970s, when it became heavily sexualized for a decade or so, and it delved into pedophilia. Reaction to the worst of that pulled it back out, but it serves as a model. Conventional advertising in the 70s used juvenile female models as sex objects until the consuming public said "enough", and then they stopped, but not before entertainment became briefly pedophilia as well. Pretty Baby, The Blue Lagoon, etc., donned the movie screens. "Does Your Mother Know" and "What's Your Name" the airwaves.
Right now you can't swing a moribund felis domesitcus without hitting some advertising effort to get you to adopt the concept that maybe you ought to crawl into bed with your own gender, and perhaps frequently, or at least that's A-OK.
All of this fuels part of the counter reaction which is raging in our time. People wonder how a late septuagenarian serial polygamist with weird bad hair can openly demand to be crowned Emperor and stand a good chance of having it happen, or how a thirty-something single Californian who has never held a real job but who spouts conspiracy theories and cloaks himself in the mantle of true conservatism can win office and be prayed over by college Republicans, or how individuals can be voted onto school boards with the intent to remove books. Well, an administration that demands you accept the unnatural, a political party that requires you accept the new eugenics, and the stocking of books in school libraries that are openly sexually perverse are a big part of the reason why.
In other words, going from the widely accepted "look, we don't tell you what to do in your bedrooms, so just leave the same sex attracted alone, and they won't bother you", to "you must accept children being taught sodomy" and "you must let gender mutilation of minors occur" is a big part of that. People on the left might claim that's the manifestation of Christian Nationalism (which it really isn't), but a lot of the reaction is just a species knowing what is biologically correct and reacting to being attacked.
In other words, toleration is one thing. Brutally forced acceptance of what you were formally asked to tolerate, quite another.
Pride itself is a curious thing, and in our Lutherarian society, worshiping individualism as it is, and declaring self-worth and worthiness in everything, grossly overdone. You can be legitimately proud of an accomplishment that has some merit, particularly difficult ones. Having pride for overcoming something, such as a difficult task, including overcoming a personal problem or vice, is fully legitimate. Being proud of a greater group of which you are part is as well, when that group has done more than simply exist, is as well, but much, much less so. "Taking pride" is different, but can have merit as well. A person can legitimately take pride, for example, in their appearance, or in their occupational or social status, assuming the latter has some merit.
Merely being proud, however, with no investment in something, tends to be arrogance. Often statements like "proud to be an American", while that can indeed have worth, are just that. Extreme cultural pride can cross over into something really vile. Members of the SS were, after all, proud to be German.
Being proud of something biological, in any sense, is totally misplaced. A person can't be proud to be tall or short. They can, however, lack shame for the same thing, which is totally different. In the category that we're dealing with, sort of, a person with a high sex drive can't really legitimately claim pride in it. Depending upon how they react to it, they may claim to be proud, in handling it in a dignified and moral fashion, or they may be in the category of those who should bear shame for how they handle it, that latter concept having gone out of fashion, seemingly, in the libertine era in which we live.
Having pride for being a member of a group that has a minority sexual inclination, which is now unfairly and bizarrely all lumped together in "LGBTQIAP2S+?" makes no more sense than being heterosexual does. Those who fit into one of those categories claim not to have achieved it, but to have had it imposed upon them, in some fashion. That's not much different than being short or tall. It comes dangerously close to endorsing a sort of racism in the same fashion that "White Pride" does.
It's also distinctly different than not being ashamed. There are plenty of reasons that those with deep-seated sexual minoritarian inclinations should not be ashamed. There's no reason, for instance, that homosexuals should be ashamed of that inclination. They didn't chose it. Not being ashamed is not price, it's not being ashamed.
That's also separate, of course, from how we react to a deep-seated inclination of that type. For eons those with such drives struggled to contain them, which we will confess was in part because of cultural norms and beliefs, and in part because of repression. Be that as it may, it wasn't all that long ago that most with such drives may have been aware of them, but they didn't dominate their existence and didn't define who they were. Now the cultural gatekeepers demand the opposite.
That doesn't touch, of course, where we are compelled by nature or morality to act towards restraint or reform. It wasn't very long ago that the Hefnerian view of the world so dominated that we openly winked at people forcing sex upon women, and those with money and power were granted the right to do so. We can all pretend that we were shocked, shocked, to learn that Bill Cosby drugged women and then had his way with them, but we knew for decades that he was hanging out at the Playboy mansion which was dedicated to no other purpose than female sexual chattel slavery. We can pretend that we didn't know that juvenile female actresses were often expected to trade in sex, and that young women in the workplace were subject to constant abuse, but it was so widely known that it was hinted at repeatedly in the movies themselves.***This leaves us with there being things we should not be ashamed of at all, things we should not be ashamed of but not yield to, and things which shame should compel us to act upon.
We should not take pride in simply having a sex drive, no matter how it is oriented. And those who question things that only yesterday were regarded by nearly everyone, including those with minoritarian inclinations, as deeply disordered, on a scientific basis should not be shouted down and be forced to shut up for not going with the flow of the day.
Indeed, we've done that before. We did it on race based slavery. We did it with destruction of indigenous cultures. More recently, we did it with eugenics, part of what became the foundation of at first Planned Parenthood, and then later, the Holocaust.
Footnotes
*Not "Christian" farmers, Protestant farmers. Indeed, Catholicism had made inroads into Native populations everywhere already, with it being the case in what became the Louisiana Purchase and Canada that their conversion was simply religious, but not cultural.
**As with abortion, it's worth noting that its the United States that really has the extreme liberal allowances in this area.
***This is portrayed, somewhat veiled, in The Godfather. It the book its not only portrayed, but not veiled, leaving the reader with the oddity that to a degree the Mafia is portrayed as more moral than the movie industry.
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