The Indelible Conscience and a Month of “Pride”

Life and Books and Everything — Clearly Reformed

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The Indelible Conscience and a Month of “Pride”

June 7, 2022

Life and Books and EverythingClearly Reformed

Pride Month turns a moral argument—about which the Bible has clear and unequivocal answers—into a quest for personal self-acceptance, which is why many soft-hearted and muddle-headed Christians line up for the parade just like everyone else.

In this episode of Life and Books and Everything, Kevin reads from the article he wrote for WORLD Opinions on the LGBTQ quest to turn a moral argument into an emotive appeal for affirmation and acceptance.

Transcript

[Music] Greetings and salutations. Welcome back to Life and Books and Everything. This is Kevin DeYoung.

Today I want to read the latest piece that I wrote for World Opinions. As always, be sure to check out all the good editorial, short articles there at World Opinions. This one, entitled The Indelible Conscience and a Month of “Pride” The LGBTQ quest to turn a moral argument into an emotive appeal for affirmation and acceptance.

In case you haven't heard, June 1 no longer marks the end of the school year or the unofficial beginning of summer, it's the start of Pride Month. Initially conceived in 1970 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Pride Month has become a government of the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The last month has become a government promoted, corporate-sponsored 30-day celebration of LGBTQ acceptance and achievements.

When rioters threw bricks and tried to burn down the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village, with police officers barricaded inside, even the most optimistic gay liberation proponent could not have dreamed that an illegally operated mafia-owned gay bar would eventually join the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon on the select list of protected, non-black, non-black, and non-black, and non-black. Pride Month is a part of the quest of protected national monuments. Pride Month is at once a brilliant marketing strategy and a striking reminder that the conscience is a terrible thing to waste.

Pride LGBTQ advocates, and it's worth mentioning that the five letters only fit together in an uneasy alliance, hit upon an ethical and strategic coup. The rallying cry of Pride transformed their quest for culture-wide moral legitimacy, a daunting task, into a personal plea for therapeutic well-being, a much easier goal. The debate would not be a head-on rational discussion about whether the sexual revolution was acceptable by standards of God's word, natural law, or Western tradition.

The debate would not be about what was good for children, good for the public, or even good for those drawn to LGBTQ behavior. Instead, Pride made the debate about feelings of personal acceptance. Changing the culture is hard work and takes a long time.

About 50 years, it turns out. Convincing people to stop making other people feel bad is a much easier sell. Even today, Pride can be difficult to refute on a emotive level.

By marching for Pride instead of marching for gay sex or sex change operations for minors, the public isn't asked to affirm actions and appearances they often instinctively find distasteful. They are asked to affirm that people should not feel ashamed of themselves. Those who hold to biblical standards of sex and sexuality are forced to play the entire game on their side of the 50-yard line.

Do you really want people to feel bad about themselves? Do you want to make people suffer? Aren't you concerned about suicide and self-loathing? How can anyone be against Pride if the alternative is violent, morbid, relentless shame? Pride month turns a moral argument about which the Bible has clear and unequivocal answers into a quest for personal self-acceptance, which is why many soft-hearted and muddled-headed Christians line up for the parade just like everyone else. But of course, Pride is not the only antidote to shame. There are other alternatives like contrition, repentance, and chastity, or spirit-empowered struggle in victory, or gospel-infused forgiveness and transformation.

One way to deal with shame is to convince yourself who shouldn't be there. The other way is to lay it at the foot of the cross. In the end, as effective as this marketing coup has been, Pride month also serves as a reminder that there are behaviors and desires about which we should not be proud.

As fallen human beings, we are more rationalizing than rational. We know how to suppress the truth and unrighteousness. If we deceive ourselves long enough, two generations will probably do it.

God threatens to withdraw his restraining mercy and give us up to dishonorable passions. And this includes women exchanging natural relations for those that are contrary to nature and men committing shameless acts with men. The punishment for these, in other sins, is sometimes death, not only for those who do them, but for all who approve of those who practice them.

Some deeds done in secret are too shameful even to speak aloud. The ubiquitous Pride parade may not be a march toward cultural suicide as much as it is a sign that we are already dead. And yet, it's also a sign that God given moral reasoning is not so easily vacated.

If you need the worlds of sports, entertainment, education, media, and government to celebrate your sexuality in order to feel proud, maybe your conscience is trying to tell you something. Might it be that deep down, behind the torrent of rainbow flags, and the blitz of billionaire sponsors? God is speaking to us a different word? Maybe the perversity of the sexual revolution is desperate for one-twelfth of the year to convince all of us that darkness really is light. Maybe it takes the entire apparatus of cultural approbation to convince us that the unnatural is natural.

Maybe we need the noise of a thousand parades to silence our collective memory of two thousand years of Christian history in the West. If it takes the entire world marching in unison to assuage the guilty conscience, perhaps Pride is just a pretense. Thanks for listening.

Once again, the indelible conscience and a month of Pride, you can find that at World Opinions. Till then, see you next time.

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