Pride Without Humility and Gratitude is Just Another Deadly Sin. How today’s LGBTQ+ have lost their way.
The “1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, & Bi Equal Rights & Liberation” changed my life. Somewhere between 300,000 and 1 million people came from all over the country — there had never been anything like it before, nor since. It was a spectacular show of visibility during a time when most were still invisible because of the dangers of coming out.
I was serving as a young Army captain working at the Pentagon in 1993, a closeted man from small town Georgia. I came out to my Southern Baptist family earlier that year, no longer willing to treat my gay sexuality as a dirty secret.
It was a time of hope bedeviled by dread. Recently inaugurated President Clinton made promises to us that filled our hearts. This same government had previously labeled homosexuals as “deviants” and now a President cared.
Some friends died of AIDS, gay men who mattered to me. I feared for my own health. We all did. Medical treatments were flimsy back then. Staying alive was something we had to think about.
I read Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book which asked the question “what are Homosexuals for?” “Once I found the strength to be myself, I had no need to act myself,” he wrote. I wanted to find that strength too.
After leaving the Army and going to law school, I got involved in gay rights. There was a lot to do. Sodomy laws, adoption, marriage, security clearances, military, workplace discrimination, hate-crimes, police raids, and AIDS.
And it all got done.
The gay rights movement was a remarkable success. We made America a better place and most Americans eventually welcomed us as citizens.
After the successes of the gay and lesbian rights movement, groups involved in that effort reworked their mission towards other issues.
The former gay rights groups embraced Queer Theory, which is about “liberation from the normal” and “regards the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality as oppressive.” (Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay)
Loosely put, they believe our understanding of sex and gender is a problem because that understanding was formed in past times. Hence the proliferation of new oppression-stopping LGBTQ+ genders, sexualities, and identities — each purportedly taken as seriously as the other.
Equality was replaced with “Equity.”
Gay and lesbian became LGBTQ+ and queer as part of the organizations’ rebranding “to become more inclusive.”
The word homosexual was made dirty again and banned. GLAAD now defines it as an “offensive term.” The Human Rights Campaign does not bother to include Homosexual in its glossary of terms but reimagines the word Gay to mean “same-gender attracted,” removing the “sex” from the meaning of homosexual. Gay and lesbian homosexuals are no longer only same sex attracted people in Queer Theory. Men, women, and “non-binary” people may now be gay, although only women and “non-binary” people may be lesbian.
Diversity and inclusion are situational to the LGBTQ+ activist class.
Gay, lesbian, and transgender people come in all political shapes and sizes: progressives and centrists and conservatives. I have a trans friend who has not voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter. The Georgia Log Cabin Republicans’ Twitter account has nearly 80,000 followers.
LGBTQ+ and queer people, however, are required to be Left or far-Left politically. Creating room for people of different political or religious viewpoints is no longer part of the formula.
Gone are the days when the work was intended to benefit all gay and LGBT people. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal gave all of us who wanted to serve a chance. Same-sex marriage rights benefited all of us who want to marry. Regardless of political preferences or religion (or skin color), all gay folk were helped.
The belief system underpinning Queer Theory is not likely something many moderate or conservative gay and trans people will agree with. The result is a focus by LGBTQ+ activists only on issues of concern to the political Left. And no dissent is allowed.
Those today who disagree with the LGBTQ+ viewpoint are targeted with insults, slurs, or worse. There is an ugliness of anger that I do not understand. We spent the past 50+ years making our world better, and it is; but you would not know it from the way activists often behave or from reading Queer groups’ fundraising emails and action-alerts.
J.K. Rowling last summer got death and rape threats (from self-described “ladydicks”) because she committed the heresy of saying biological sex is a male-female binary. Women, feminists, and lesbians get slurred as a “TERF” (trans exclusive radical feminist) if they do not agree with gender ideology. These “gender critical” women are also often threatened with physical and sexual violence or professional harm.
Few people — gay or straight — understand trans issues because activists have discouraged conversations outside of academic or medical settings.
Transgender (those with gender dysphoria who live as the opposite sex) Americans have the legal rights that gays and lesbians have obtained. They can marry, adopt children, work in government, teach school, be a soldier, politician, professor, or a truck driver.
I represented transgender clients in my Georgia law practice, from obtaining legal name changes to litigating child custody disputes. Living a life of dignity is what they wanted and that is what all of us want. Yet we have to create that life in a world that is sometimes unwelcoming and unkind.
Current issues involving transgender people include: Can different biological sexes compete in the same sport, access the same restrooms, prisons, or homeless shelters? Can children consent to transition? What does “transgender child” mean?
Not all transgender people agree with the LGBTQ+ positions. Debbie Hayton, Aaron Terrell, and Scott Newgent are among those who use their Twitter accounts to share parts of their lives to help the rest of us better understand.
These are controversial issues with politicians and activists involved. Hyperbole from every direction is the result. The intensity of one’s position advocacy is not an excuse for vile and vulgarity, however.
Transgender people are around 0.6% of the US adult population, about 1.4 million people, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute. Seeking to redefine sex and gender is a big deal because it impacts the remainder 99.4% of adults who are not trans. The math part of this ought to incentivize a more collaborative approach by gender identity activists.
LGBTQ+ leaders and groups help fuel incivility.
The ACLU’s transgender rights lawyer, Chase Strangio, advocates banning books and speech that conflict with LGBTQ+ positions. This is the same ACLU originally formed specifically to protect the First Amendment.
Former transgender Human Rights Campaign staffer, Charlotte Clymer, praised the “trans-affirming medical care with state funds” in Iran, whose culture tortures homosexual men with “sex change” surgeries. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran; they believe gay men are women born in the wrong body (sound familiar?).
Thousands of gays are reported to have been executed since the Islamic theocracy took hold in the late 1970’s, to include a young man’s beheading by family members earlier this year.
Many are coerced into genital surgeries to become transexual, which is legal, by family and social pressures — and by fear for their lives. There are no heterosexual trans women in Iran. Lesbians are also targeted similarly. (As an aside, majority Christian or Jewish countries do not allow killing gays.)
Detransitioners — those who revert to living their biological sex after deciding transitioning was a mistake — are ridiculed and scorned by the LGBTQ+. Most of these Detransitioners are lesbian and gay homosexuals, yet Queer organizations provide no services or resources to them.
The recent CBS 60 Minutes report about Detransitioners brought to light the lifetime of difficulties these lesbian women and gay men will experience, from changed voices to lost breasts to lost reproductive function. The Queer media ignores Detransitioners because the LGBTQ+ do not want these lesbian and gay stories told. They have become collateral damage to the LGBTQ+ drive to stifle transparency and dissent.
Some are also now banning gay and lesbian police officers from Pride Parades. These are men and women who put their lives on the line for the rest of us and disrespect is their reward.
Others vilify still The Salvation Army, now the largest provider of direct services to poor gay and trans and LGBTQ+ people in the country, because of the group’s Christian religious beliefs. This despite The Salvation Army “serving everyone without discrimination,” regardless of “gender, sexual orientation, or gender orientation.” No LGBTQ+ organization does similar work. “Diversity and inclusion” can feel shallow and short-sighted at times.
Troubles for these controversial and divisive approaches by US queer activists may be on the horizon.
The United Kingdom is embroiled with several LGBTQ+ scandals caused by overzealous activists. Their Tavistock Gender Clinic and leading political advocacy group Stonewall (their equivalent to the Human Rights Campaign) are in turmoil.
“This is a form of conversion therapy for young people who are gay or lesbian,” is how Dr. David Bell, a Tavistock psychiatrist of 24 years, described his concerns to the BBC about the experimental treatment of gender dysphoric children with puberty blockers. A UK court recently banned the practice, ruling children lack the capacity to consent. Sweden recently did the same thing.
Media reports about LGBTQ+ intimidation tactics and pressure influencing the gender clinic practices have resulted in Stonewall’s credibility being shaken and its donors fleeing. LGBTQ+ and gender identity movement leaders “have managed to capture policy — medically, professionally, in the media and in the government — with no evidence base. It’s a purely politicized movement,” said Dr. Bell.
We won our gay rights by changing hearts and minds, not by acting like the Westboro Baptist Church.
Dignity and respect are not an entitlement. You will get dignity and respect from others only if you give dignity and respect to others.
Every LGBTQ+ person who watched Bishop Michael Curry’s 2018 wedding sermon for Harry and Megan lauded his sermon, “Dr. King was right: we must discover love — the redemptive power of love. And when we do that, we will make this old world, a new world.”
Richard Nixon put it a different way. “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
The work needed today — for the benefit all gay and trans and LGBTQ+ people — is in conservative and evangelical and Republican spaces. When homophobia and transphobia go down in any group, everybody in every group benefits.
Progress in these spaces will not happen through activism by tantrum. Ten years ago, few Democrats supported same-sex marriage; today most do, and that change did not happen because of ugliness and meanness directed towards Democrats.
Fifty-five percent of Republicans now support same-sex marriage rights, according to Gallup, including 43% of evangelicals. These are wonderful trends, and they could accelerate if the LGBTQ+ activist class were less unhappy in their advocacy. There is plenty of reason for optimism.
A conservative Christian U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, gave transgender Americans their first Supreme Court victory: workplace protections against discrimination. Another conservative Christian Supreme Court Justice, Anthony Kennedy, wrote each of the four prior pro-gay SCOTUS rulings, including striking down the sodomy laws that jailed gays for having sex.
The most prominent transgender woman in the world is a conservative Republican, Caitlyn Jenner. She is communicating in spaces and with people whom the LGBTQ+ today refuse to civilly engage.
Today’s activist class needs to remember where they come from and then figure out where they want to go. The constant shapeshifting of LGBTQ+ priorities, definitions, and identities suggests a lack of meaningful purpose.
Pride without humility and gratitude is just another deadly sin.
There’s a scene towards the end of the beautiful film Uncle Frank that grabbed me in the gut. Set in 1973, Frank is a gay man from rural, evangelical South Carolina who has built a safe and comfortable out life for himself in New York City.
Frank is haunted by traumatic memories from childhood involving a viciously homophobic father and a lost first love. He is closeted to all his family, except to his niece Beth with whom he has a special relationship.
Uncle Frank is unexpectedly outed to his family after his father’s death. He is overcome with memories filled with guilt and shame. Frank does not want to attend the funeral, fearful of family rejection.
Beth says to her Uncle Frank, “So years ago when you told me I should be what I want to be, not what other people want me to be. That was just bullshit? You know that conversation changed my life. Now I find out you can’t be who you are unless nobody around you disagrees with it?”
Are we able to be who we are if somebody around us disagrees with it?
Jeff Cleghorn is a past president of The Stonewall Bar Association of Georgia and a former board member of Lambda Legal, Georgia Equality, AID Atlanta, and SLDN.
