Another pride parade month has come and gone.  My very upscale, very safe, very woke suburb held its annual Pride Parade a couple weeks ago, both conducted and attended by privileged people who have never known oppression and never will.  They likely couldn’t name a single historical activist (other than Harvey Milk, maybe) or tell you what happened at Stonewall, and they certainly aren’t keen on comparing the status of the LGBTQ++ crowd here in white supremacist America against, say, their status in the remoter regions of the non-West BIPOC world.

Needless to say, I don’t attend the event.  Sandwiched as it is between the Women’s Suffrage Parade and the Abolish Slavery Parade, I find the Pride parade to be just another cookie cutter rerun of today’s activists fighting their ancestors’ causes.  And peppered between the youthful activists are their parents, dull cogs in the Party machine whose intellectual prowess never plumbs deeper than aping the catchphrases du jour.  Like the sniveling Parsons in Orwell’s 1984, they’d actually be proud of their kids for turning them over to the authorities for any violation of groupthink.  As for the businesses and “churches” who cling to the bandwagon, their motives derive solely from a desire to not upset the State which, for anyone paying attention, is one of the hallmarks of true fascism.

To be fair, my town does try to keep the parade family-friendly, even if some of the attention-starved attendees don’t.  The same cannot be said for the big city parades — amorphous crude orgies designed solely to shock the tattered remains of civil society.  I thought the whole point of the parade was to show that gay people are normal adults trying to peacefully live their lives, not overgrown children who never matured past their Marilyn Manson phase.  Far be it from me to read the minds of gay people, but if there were a Straight Pride parade that consisted of unsightly heterosexuals clawing nakedly over each other in mindless, animalistic fornication, you can bet that neither me nor my kids would be in attendance to “celebrate.”  If you get your kicks from gyrating your bared nether regions in the faces of grade schoolers just to stick it to Traditional Family Inc., then your motivation is grounded in the very spite and hatred you claim to oppose, and you are the problem.

But the problem goes beyond glorified smut.  Whatever less-offensive cause the Pride Parade once represented has morphed into a vehicle for ideological conformity to which, sooner rather than later, the consequences for not raising your fist and chanting with the crowd will reverberate beyond social media bans.  And such conformity extends well beyond the realm of sexuality.  Two Minutes of Hate is always a 24/7 endeavor.

At recent Pride parades, bans have been imposed on Jewish symbols.  Elsewhere, uniformed police were prohibited from “inclusion” and instead, they were admonished to “acknowledge their harm”.  At yet others, lesbians were attacked as “bigots” and “Nazis” for being biological women who are sexually attracted to…wait for it…other biological women.  We are currently witnessing the slow motion exclusion of the LGB in favor of the T, and gay Americans are realizing that, like the blacks and women and Latinos and Jews and working class whites before them, they were simply used by the Left as disposable pawns through which to secure permanent political power.  In Canada, the powers that be have already removed the “L”, the “G”, and the “B”, from the ever-evolving acronym (which is now, for the moment, 2STNBGC), effectively jettisoning the first three letters that brought the whole thing into existence.  They’ve served their purpose, and are now being erased.

Maybe genial bakers in Colorado were never the threat.

To the Left, yesterday’s martyr is often today’s oppressor.  This is an undisputed fact that has played out like clockwork in every leftist upheaval, starting with the storming of the Bastille and showing no signs of stopping with drag queen story hours.  Being simply gay in America is no longer edgy and risqué.  It’s boring and bourgeois.  And as the Overton window shifts ever leftward, gay America is being relegated to the same category of irredeemable wretches as the rest of us ultra-MAGA semi-fascists.  It would do transgender activists well to understand the Left’s playbook, lest they get too comfortable atop their intersectional perch.  They won’t remain there for long.

Petty tyrants are no longer thin men with cropped haircuts in brown shirts marching in crisp formation.  They’re now corpulent androgynes with knee-high rainbow socks shrieking for the cancellation of anyone with whom they disagree.  They march with the fanatical certainty that they are 100% right about everything all the time, and that they possess the moral authority to enact their will through censorship and violence.  Sexuality no longer has anything to do with it.  To the true believers, it never did.

There is a macabre scene in the screen adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.  The protagonists, two young boys, discover that the villain Mr. Dark is using his traveling carnival not to entertain people, but to enslave their bodies and destroy their souls.  One day the carnival holds a parade down Main Street, led by Mr. Dark himself, who can be seen constantly scanning the crowd with his predatory eyes.  The boys run to join the parade until they coldly realize that it’s not actually a parade.  It’s a search.  For them.  The nonconformists who have seen through the deceptions and illusions and understand the carnival for what it is.

Pride Month is becoming a search for nonconformists.  You can still get away unnoticed by skipping the parade, but why don’t you have a “Love Is Love” yard sign?  Why do you not send email signatures with your pronoun preferences?  Why doesn’t your social media account have a rainbow flag next to your name?  Why are you buying Coors Light at WalMart rather than Bud Light at Target?  You don’t have a problem with your 2nd grader identifying as non-binary, do you?  Do you?

My town doesn’t have a parade for Memorial Day.  My town doesn’t have a parade for Independence Day.  My town doesn’t have a parade for Thanksgiving.  My town certainly doesn’t have a parade for Christmas.  But my town has a big, loud, officially approved, unofficially mandated, Pride parade.  And Pride itself, quietly but with impressive rapidity, has morphed from a single parade into an entire month.  Biden officials are pressing to extend it throughout the summer.  You can read this and roll your eyes, or you can read this and see a dystopia that’s a lot closer than we expected.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.