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Every year on June 1, when Pride Month begins, conservative media and commentators start complain about Pride events. It happens like clockwork: They argue that Pride has gone too far. They whine about corporations that participate. And they argue that it is time to kill Pride.
Let me be the first "conservative commentator" to say that no, it is not time to kill Pride. There will never be a time to kill Pride because there is a rationale for it that still holds water.
Gay and lesbian Pride events started in America because gays and lesbians were beaten in the streets, banned from congregating together, and lived under the constant threat of being fired for their jobs due to their same-sex attraction.
But the complaining conservatives are right about one thing: That rationale has been undermined in 2023. Pride has unfortunately turned into a free-for-all in which people parade their sexual fetishes in public and corporations are bullied into supporting this nonsense for fear they'll be seen as "homophobic" or "anti-LGBT."
That is not how Pride started, and it's time to get back to basics.
The earliest pride events were started and organized not by the "trans women of color" that far-Left LGBTQ activists and revisionist historians would like you to believe started them, but by run of the mill (and, yes, mostly white) gays and lesbians who had the social, financial, and political capital to organize in support of basic rights: the right to be seen. The right to exist. The right to gather in public.
Eventually, those rights started expanding to the fight for marriage equality, the freedom from employment discrimination, and the freedom to serve in the military—a right that I was once arrested at the White House for protesting to secure.
But here's the thing: That equality was achieved. In 2011, the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law that barred gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military went into effect. In 2015, gays and lesbians in America gained the right to be married (and divorced) like any other American. Then, in 2020, a conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGBT people from employment discrimination. And just last year, the Respect For Marriage Act became law, ensuring that the hard-won rights of gays and lesbians would not be eliminated by the political whims of any incoming administration.
That success caused a problem for Pride events, apparently. Because what we're seeing now at Pride events across the country has nothing to do with hardworking gays and lesbians fighting for equality before the law. It's no longer about same-sex attracted men and women celebrating their hard-won achievement of full equality, nor is it about giving gay and lesbian-identifying teens and young adults an outlet for the free expression we should all have in our youth.
Instead, Pride events have become nearly entirely centered on a transgender and "queer" fringe that is myopically focused on pushing what is all too often an agenda focused on children that is far out of step with the general public's views on these controversial issues. Mainstream adults had no problem with drag queens until these activists decided that they needed to read stories to small children. And most people have no idea what to think about the very recent and deeply experimental medications and surgeries given to young teens who identify as transgender. And yet, this activist fringe says that if you do not think exactly what they tell you to think about this, you're a "bigot." And they have the backing of major corporations to help them do so.
June is the month when corporations across America fall over themselves to change their logos into rainbow colors, and most have adopted the so-called "progress flag" that includes the transgender stripes as well as black and brown stripes to "include" trans people and gays and lesbians of color, injecting race and gender ideology onto a symbol that was never meant to include either. By adopting this now controversial symbol, corporations are injecting themselves into a culture war they wanted nothing to do with. Yet embracing these displays has little to do with the acceptance of gays and lesbians that the vast majority of Americans now have, and everything to do with the ideologies of the activist fringe.
If a corporation embraces the Pride flag, they're now embracing Drag Queen Story Hour, the medical and social transitioning of minors, and the radical gender ideology that has taken hold of the movement and turned pride month into the never-ending fiasco of cultural Marxism that it has become. As Target and Bud Light have found out over the past few weeks after wading into entirely avoidable controversies, this now has real consequences and implications for businesses.
The answer, however, is not to eliminate Pride Month or Pride events. That's foolish and backward thinking, and there is far too much corporate money along with billions of dollars in gay and lesbian buying power involved at this point.
The answer is to rein it all in. The answer is to give companies and corporations an off-ramp from insanity, to let them know that it's OK to support gays and lesbians without wading into deeply controversial waters of gender ideology, Drag Queen Story Hour, and the medical transitioning of minors. They can support gay and lesbian Americans without being held hostage by the Human Rights Campaign or GLAAD or any number of LGBT-oriented organizations that have been captured and overtaken by the TQ fringe.
As the founder of a media platform called StopWoke, the co-founder of a consultancy designed to advise corporations how to express support for diverse groups without wading into controversial or deeply political waters and as an openly gay man, I believe that there is power in Pride events. As critical of them as I am, I still do attend certain ones even to this day. Gays and lesbians will always need a place to feel comfortable, affirmed, and accepted, both in the workplace and in real life. This is something that the anti-Pride activists on the Right do not and will never understand.
As long as there is a gay or lesbian teenager that feels uncomfortable with who they are, or a gay or lesbian adult that feels unsafe walking down the street with their partner—and there always will be—then there will be a reason for Pride. What it has turned into doesn't seem to be working for anyone—but what it started as and what it can be again is something worth fighting for, not ending.
Rob Smith is a decorated Iraq war veteran and the founder of StopWoke, a media platform and consultancy designed to fight woke ideology in Corporate America, the public education system, and the United States Military.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
