There’s a popular meme that makes the rounds around this time each year.
It shows a dam towering over a tranquil city. Behind the structure lies a burgeoning, rainbow-colored sludge on the verge of breaking through and flooding the inhabitants below. Inscribed on the dam’s face is a date: “May 31st.”
It’s funny because it’s true. Or at least, it used to be.
Rainbow paraphernalia, which was once visible only in a few metropolitan neighborhoods, has been taking over our common and commercial spaces — not to mention our schools — during the month of June for years.
Fortune 500 companies changed their logos (at least in the West), stores set up expansive Pride displays and sold Pride-branded merchandise, including, infamously, Target’s selection of transgender swimsuits for children. City, state, and federal agencies hoisted the rainbow flag next to the American flag, and traditional and social media pumped out images and videos celebrating everything LGBTQ.
But something’s different this year. Many of the businesses and institutions that used to radiate rainbows every June look a lot like they did last month and the month before that. They appear normal, as if their primary purpose were to provide services and sell products, not to advance a political ideology.
To be sure, some progressive enclaves are still festooned with Pride trappings, and there remains dribs and drabs of rainbow propaganda out there elsewhere, but much of it looks half-hearted at best. Pride parades have been cancelled due to low projected attendance, and government buildings that used to fly the rainbow flag have stopped doing so — even in California.
What changed? For one, there’s a new president, and he’s busy gutting “trans rights” by prohibiting men from usurping women’s sports and putting a stop to the poisoning and mutilation of children under the Orwellian misnomer “gender affirming care.”
That’s a mighty blow to the “T” and “Q” in the “LGBTQ” coalition. To be fair, there are elements within the gay community that want nothing to do with the “T’s” and “Q’s.” However, it’s not clear that they can separate amicably or coherently. If the claim is that our sexual desires should have no normative connection to the reality of our physical bodies — which every letter in the rainbow acronym affirms — then embracing “LGB” necessarily opens the door to the “T’s” and Q’s” by relativizing the objective meaning and purpose of the body itself.
So, taking on transgenderism at the political level will necessarily weaken Pride ideology as a whole. And for now, the administration has the upper hand.
Second, corporations have grown skittish of boycotts after Bud Light’s disastrous promotion of the woman-larping man, Dylan Mulvaney. This one’s pretty simple: Bud Light used to be America’s best-selling beer. It isn’t anymore.
More broadly, conservative activists like The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, Christopher Rufo, Robby Starbuck, and others, have clarified the cost-benefit calculus for C-suites by putting a steep price on supporting Pride. It turns out that endorsing a radical fringe group that is big online but small in purchasing power while alienating half the country doesn’t make much fiscal sense.
Third, and relatedly, there’s been a palpable cultural shift as the masses have grown tired of the rainbow brigade’s garish frills, manufactured enthusiasm, coercive fanfare (Celebrate!–or else), and infantile tautologies (“Love is love”).
Initially startled and disoriented by the explosion of Pride into every nook and cranny of society, many have now had the time to step back and ask, “What, exactly, are we celebrating here?”
Bearded men dressed up like clownishly risque women gyrating in front of toddlers at drag queen story hours? Pornographic books in elementary schools? Boys taking over girls’sports? Young men and women permanently maiming themselves with genital inversion surgery?
Why in the world, normal people are asking, is any of this laudatory, let alone permissible?
The rainbow flag used to come with the cry, “We just want to be left alone.” The majority found those terms acceptable. There was a truce in the culture wars, at least on that front. But then Pride, consistent with its name, got arrogant and greedy and let its true colors show.
It turns out that all those LGBTQ parades, protests, workplace trainings, and school curricula were never about tolerance, or love, or protecting the vulnerable. Rather, their goal was to gain cultural and political supremacy and to silence anyone who stood in the way.
Aptly represented by its ever-more-chaotic symbol, rainbow ideology is and always has been a twisted kaleidoscope of totalitarian perversion. Thankfully, many are waking up and pushing back.
Matthew R. Petrusek, PhD, is the Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
