PRIDE MONTH: THE CONSERVATIVE DELUSION OF THE SOURCE & SCOPE OF THE LGBT MOVEMENT
In light of recent events—it simply being “Pride Month”; the Bud Light, Starbucks, and Target boycotts; the MLB ordering teams to not use their Pride uniform variations—it is worthwhile to craft a Substack addressing the national, corporate, and political issue of the LGBT movement in our modern America. The boycotts and corporate backtracks on a couple of issues have motivated many conservatives to claim victory and use these scenarios to prove that we, conservatives, have the will of the people on our side and that sure victory is on the immediate horizon. Supporting this notion there are a flurry of comments from prominent conservative pundits—i.e. Tucker Carlson, Jason Whitlock—offering the observation that the LGBT movement is not a bottom-up, organic movement in this country; but a corporate, politically elite, top-down imposition on the American people from those who hold the levers of power in our society.
Both of these takes are convenient from a conservative perspective, but wholly inadequate to explain the circumstance we’re in today and how we can legitimately navigate our way out of it. This Substack article will try and lay out what the actual scenario we are facing is. Spoiler: its basis is vice and its antidote is virtue.
[At the end of the article you can see a concise presentation of what the Conservative claim about the LGBT situation is and what the actual situation is.]
America has an LGBT attitude toward Sex
The vast majority of people in America are not against LGBTism. America has an LGBT attitude toward sex. The majority of Americans are neither L, G, B, or T, but the majority of Americans, whether married or not, use contraceptives, or permit/endorse them in certain scenarios. Additionally, the majority of Americans approve of scientific interventions for procreating children, either for themselves or for others. This one-two punch is fatal to any logical argument against LGBTism. If you permit or endorse sterile sex, then you are handcuffed in taking a position against the sterile sex of LGBTs. If you permit or endorse scientific interventions for procreating children, then there is nothing in your worldview that precludes LGBTs from being parents to [lab-created] children. Your battle is already lost—and the only counter force you can put up against LGBTs will of necessity be one of personal animus and hostility. You have no means of holding a temperate, dispassionate, and clear position against any of it. You have no means of retaining a respect for your neighbor—many of which are L, G, B, or T, or Contraceptors, IVFers, at that—while seeing with clarity that what they are engaged in is deteriorating to their personal soul (i.e. their love of God and the order of His creation) and affecting the souls and health of those in the broader community as all affirmed and deliberate sin most certainly does.
It is not a coincidence that so many that take a hardline stance against LGBTism either bracket off LGBT as a political movement separate from those doing it, or they outright claim they have no problem with it in principle. They do this because they can’t oppose it in principle given their own approving stance toward condoms, birth control, or vasectomies. They undermine all their efforts. They expose their position to be fundamentally arbitrary and consequentially illegitimate. It is no overstatement to say that the logical errors of our time are our own undoing.
The only legitimate position against LGBTism is one that differentiates between the morality and immorality of sex by its procreative capacity and retains the procreative right for those coming together in natural union as the act that grounds the spousal (and consequentially parental) love of a family.
Understanding the “Top-Down” Cope
Those who attempt to address the LGBT movement as a top-down driven agenda do so for one obvious, psychologically convenient, reason: if the movement is top-down, then we can defeat the elites on this issue and comfortably, and immediately, return to their idea of general sanity without having to do the arduous work of fundamentally overcoming lust within our individual selves and within our society. [Lust, you may recall, is inordinate sexual desire (i.e. “out of order” with the relationship between sex and procreation).] There’s no doubt that social norms and structures can help to facilitate this process, but the work must manifest in individual people’s lives.
[Note: It’s worth noting here that we do not need a majority of citizens to be virtuous to have a virtuous society. That would be a very high, and dare we say ‘hopeless’, standard to have to achieve. Leadership really is what makes the difference. But we do need a significant portion (some 15%, roughly) to be virtuous so that we can have leaders in every rung of our society that are legitimately virtuous and can inspire the greater majorities of people either toward moderate virtue, or at least away from vice, and/or toward virtuous societal norms.]
For boomers (for obvious reasons) the argument that the LGBT movement is top-down driven, and consequently easily defeatable if we just make one brief, strong stand against it, is convenient. The idea of justice—which regulates social interactions—is fatiguing to them, and in their late years they largely lack the vigor or motivation for virtue formation that is required of it… It takes years to be formed in virtue and is meant to be worked toward for the sake of the benefits it slowly and subtly returns across a 40-year adult lifespan from 30-70 years of age.
For the young politically conservative individual endorsing a worldview of sexual vice, or lacking the resolve to rebuff their boomer peers in the field, the top-down argument is also convenient as it gives them something to displace their disillusionment on (“the elites”) and affect a passion that is missing from their inner life.
In both cases it’s a weak argument-cope and it will not hold.
Understanding the “Will of the Masses” Cope
The other argument we see put forward is that the “silent”, or actual, majority of Americans are against LGBTism. First off, no they’re not—because as we already laid out, they are principally LGBT-adjacent in their contraceptive sexual ethics. And second, the notion that you need the majority of people to be against something for it to be substantiated as illegitimate is a presupposition around democracy that is fallacious and absurd itself. Whether the will of the masses are against LGBTism—which they’re certainly not—is irrelevant to whether it can be understood as immoral according to a procreative sexual ethic (the rubric by which nature and reason, springing from God, measure sexual morality). Whether the will of the masses goes one way or another is irrelevant to anyone that doesn’t idolize democracy—the 2nd false idol of modernity—in the first place.
The Call to Virtue
So once again, we’re back at square one—which is the right place to be. Let us be motivated to sharpen our minds and our thinking, to cultivate virtue, and to judge situations according to the principles of a God-worldview. Do not be swayed by the winds of the times. Hold fast to the truth and carry on.+
It is telling that the boycotts finally when they messed with the men. The fake women's liberation movement is at the heart of the movement and started with the pill. The pill that we now know causes cancer, infertility and life long hormones imbalances yet it is still given out like candy.