Today is the last day of June, which means that starting tomorrow, the rainbow flags flown at government buildings and private residences, hung in coffee shops and hardware stores and dentists’ offices, arranged in colorful collages made of construction paper in public elementary classrooms, splashed onto corporate logo backgrounds on social media and in marketing email headers — in all of the many places that this symbol has occupied pride of place for the last month or so it can start being quietly removed without too much real pushback.
The pride flag is far more insidious than you let on. It signifies both a sterile, spiritually dead worldview that reduces human fulfillment to the attainment of glandular function, man as orgasm machine; as well as a pan-national ideological movement that supercedes and in many cases entirely replaces national allegiance for its adherents. The conversation should have ended decades ago with a collective "no we will not endorse and reify certain privileged sexual paraphilia." That people were largely duped into accepting all of this with a manufactured moral panic about the need for "gay marriage" (a contradiction in terms) is alone enough to shove this all back in the closet. The rainbow flag should be every bit as taboo as the hammer and sickle.
You don't get to decide to stop partway down the slippery slope. Either you slide all the way to the hell at the bottom or you climb painfully all the way back up.
Right. Not going to work to say JK Rowling is a hero but Jack Philips deserves what he gets. Then they just laugh and say, eh, just give us another decade to indoctrinate the kids and JK will be where Jack is.
Plenty of people consider those two in exactly the same boat. Do you think there's a widespread perception that Philips deserves the harassment he's endured? Seems the opposite from where I'm sitting.
The majority of Americans of all stripes do not often think deeply about the sexual relationships of modal gay men. If they did, the rate of acceptance would be much, much lower.
One doesn't have to think deeply about them. One only has to to know how homosexuals really behave sexually. The facts are horrifying to normal people.
"In light of this new normal and in commemoration of its last official day, it’s worth pausing and asking how we got here. When did it become essential that my neighborhood pet store fly a flag celebrating sexual minorities? Am I to understand that gay or transgender individuals are implicitly not welcome to buy dog food at a store lacking such symbolry? It’s close to ubiquitous in many parts of my city (namely the places the nice white progressives cluster), as common to see on a shop door as the opening hours. As an urgent symbol of protest or reassurance it’s flatly contradictory, flying as it does in neighborhoods where the question of gay acceptance is as close to settled as any social issue ever can be. In practice the flag is as incongruous and anachronistic as a sign proudly proclaiming “We do not discriminate by race: Negros and Chinamen welcome to shop here.” Further, its quotidian nature, its sheer humdrum commonness, robs it of any ability to communicate any vital difference in the establishments that display it. It has all the explanatory power of a lighted no-smoking placard on an airplane in 2025. So why must my dentist’s office be, in some small but public measure, queer?"
Since we are Scott Alexander-posting, I think we know the answer to this question as well:
As an aside, I am both frustrated by the expanding number of progress pride flags and relieved by them. The sooner the plain-Jane rainbow flag is removed from the progressive orthodoxy, the sooner I am able to identify which rainbow-colored books are LGBTQIA2S+ propaganda vs. which are simply brightly-colored children's books.
As the father of a 6-year old girl who is currently extremely oppressed by the patriarchy in her aesthetics (eg "she loves rainbows and unicorns and pink and mermaids and princesses"), it's kind of amusing to think we might reach a point where her preferred color doesn't have sexual valences anymore
“It is almost unthinkable for most urban Americans to imagine a main street festooned with explicitly religious iconography in the same places pride flags now fly”
Before 1960 or so you might have had a point. Christmas celebrations have been chiefly secular for decades. You will absolutely not find icons of the virgin in your local coffeeshop, and the nativity scene outside city hall was sued into oblivion long ago.
No, but are making a moral statement that is at odds with the dominant religious beliefs of the country. Less true than it used to be, attitudes are shifting.
Santa Claws is not religious. Now Semana Santa introduced into our Cities could prove interesting. The pride is the pride of lucifer. The followers are deceived and will hustle into hell with puzzled looks on their unthinking faces. So we should pray for them. Thought for the Day.
It’s interesting how Christmas is accepted as a mass consumer holiday, while Easter continues to stall out. You get a massive candy aisle in March with some plastic grass and baskets. The crucifixion in particular resists mainstreaming. Meanwhile Christmas has a carnival aspect and is so secularized when TV shows say a character has missed the true meaning of Christmas, 99 times out of 100 we learn the true meaning is caring or loving or maybe giving. From that 1% you get Linus reciting the Gospel and Small One, otherwise it’s back to impotently offsetting the commercial greed machine.
The regular Pride flag actually removes a colour from the standard Western rainbow, taking it from 7 to 6. This is because 6 is the most important sacred number in Kabbalistic numerology: 6 stripes on the Pride flag; 6 points on the Star of David; 6 million purported victims of the Holocaust; etc.
Somewhat facetious, yes. Esoteric reasons are amusing and indicative rather than determinative.
The 7 was chosen by Newton for esoteric reasons (Newton wrote more on alchemy and numerology than on physics, and was at best a heterodox Christian), but those reasons were unrelated to the Jewish mystical significance of 6. Prior to Newton, the rainbow was usually seen as having 5 colours (e.g. Boyle, 1664). Wikipedia has a reasonably good summary, which also explains that indigo isn't “fake”, it's just that Newton used different terminology than we do (blue = cyan, indigo = blue): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Number_of_colours_in_a_spectrum_or_a_rainbow
The question is why, after several centuries of stability, the 7th colour was removed for such an odd cause as homosexual liberation. Just as Newton's choice of esoteric 7 was a reflection of the beliefs that motivated him, so the queer activists' choice of the sacred number 6 was a reflection of the beliefs that motivated them. Since so many leaders of the movement were of Jewish ethnicity (as queer Jewish groups are proud to admit), it is hardly bizarre to hypothesise that their reverence for the number 6, ingrained in them from the cradle, was a motivation for this unusual choice to change the then-standard number of colours.
I keep wondering when the concept of genetic engineering will enter into the discussion around the pride flag. I don't know if there is a conspiracy or just an emergence, like the advent of powered, controlled flight, but if I wanted to prepare humans for accepting genetic engineering, I'd have to destroy the current system. The current system is one where a man and woman each provide 50% of the genetic material of a child which they then dedicate their energies to bringing to adulthood. But with genetic engineering, the child might have any number of sources of genetic material, some of them perhaps not human or only the product of a laboratory. Who would be the mom and the dad then? I sincerely apologize for suggesting some sort of conspiracy, I don't think there is one. I don't know. It could just be the natural result of us knowing of the existence of DNA. Do we really think that the genetic makeup of babies will be determined by two teenagers at a high school prom for the next thousand years?
The truth is this: in all likelihood there will be some kind of backlash. What form it takes I do not know. But it is like an old rubber band. Basically I doubt sodomy laws will come back, but is suspect there will be a general agreement that LGBTQ have to basically get in the closet again, but they will be allowed to come out occasionally.
The thing is this: people generally want their families to continue. Anyone who does not will have their family end.
No, “anti-LGBT” laws are not being passed across the country. States are outlawing child sex changes. Lump those two things together at your peril.
People often bring up cost as the reason for falling birth rates, but it’s not true and never has been. This is easily demonstrated by observing that fertility is inversely correlated with income, within countries and between countries.
Once the moral crusaders have saved their latest victim from oppression they get bored and move on to their next minority. In an open and compliant society they will quickly run out of victims to save so it's uncertain what they will do to keep themselves occupied.
I think the comments on this post are proof enough that the pride flag will always be taken as an explicitly political statement, and that gay rights will always need defending. Sure, being pro-LGBTQ+ is now the default position, but I think as we get further into the (justified) backlash against extreme trans activists, gay marriage and public acceptance of gay couples may get swept up in the meantime.
I generally agree with you though, that people who fly the hideous chevron flag (complete with black and brown lines and the intersex symbol) or put up those "In this house we believe..." signs, are not trying to make a political statement, and instead are just signalling their in-group status. This is a big problem with the left right now. That is, the idea that we've "won," and that we no longer need to engage our hateful and stupid opponents, that we only need to signal our in-group status to other leftists.
I got banned from a subreddit for liberal gun owners for making a much milder version of this observation, that all those rainbows and BLM fists actually do signal something political. It was in the context of their daily thread about Trump merch at the gun store and how that makes them feel unwelcome, and apparently they didn't appreciate the parallel.
I can’t believe somebody would be banned from a subreddit for pointing out a contradiction in the dominant ideology. First time I’ve heard of something like that happening.
This is a technically incorrect phrase. Sex in mammals cannot be "changed" by any means, surgical or otherwise. I suggest "sex-trait modification surgeries" as a more accurate phrasing.
I don't really see the difference between these flags and American flags. Hanging up a US flag does not mean I endorse all actions of the US government. A lot of the complaints in this piece remind me of left-wing complaints about American flags being everywhere . There are some merit to both sets of complaints, but ultimately I don't think it matters much, you just tune it out eventually.
There are places where American flags persist as dominant symbol of the civic religion, but no major metro. And those places are more marginal every year.
the flags are everywhere but they are no longer register as a "dominant symbol of the civic religion" because their ubiquity leads to banality, and the meaning fades. The same will happen with pride flags, just give it time.
yep. among some of my more progressive friends the basic rainbow flag is considered almost reactionary and you need at one of ones with the triangle on the left side (forget what they are called). Some thing on the other side with the American flag. It's too blasé now, you need a Gadsden flag, a thin blue line flag, or one of those pine tree ones to really get the message across
But I think my point still stands because it's all noise to me, and seeing any of these flags does not affect my daily life at all. (I do mostly like seeing pride flags because I think it's a sign of social progress, and I mostly like seeing American flags because it helps reassure me I did not accidentally wander in Canada, but if you took the flags away my life would be no better or worse)
In the eastern reaches of Bushwick, Brooklyn, American flags significantly outnumber pride flags. (And Old Glory is getting more common.) Although to be fair, Puerto Rican flags outnumber both of them by lot.
Hmm. Am I at risk in Blue America by being AFAICT the only person to comment here under their real name?
The whole idea that this would never get to the kids is the height of self-delusion. Grooming and pederasty are the norm in the gay community. The has been the case since ancient times.
Sullivan and others, assuming they were honest in the first place, were the extreme exception to the reality that older gay men prey on younger men, often minors, in the hopes of having a sexual relationship with them. We all repeat the mindless mantra that “love is love,” but this is a very different kind of love than the kind that leads to marriage and children.
I think there's a case to be made that Sullivan and others like him are aware of this behavior and condemn it as part of the campaign for normalization and equal rights. Social media and pride parades aren't doing them any favors on this front.
It's nothing compared to the gender ideology push though. Gay teenage boys getting groomed by older men is one thing, your six old daughter being told by her teacher that she might be a boy born into the wrong body is another. Both bad, but one is a very different kind of threat to a typical parent.
The pride flag is far more insidious than you let on. It signifies both a sterile, spiritually dead worldview that reduces human fulfillment to the attainment of glandular function, man as orgasm machine; as well as a pan-national ideological movement that supercedes and in many cases entirely replaces national allegiance for its adherents. The conversation should have ended decades ago with a collective "no we will not endorse and reify certain privileged sexual paraphilia." That people were largely duped into accepting all of this with a manufactured moral panic about the need for "gay marriage" (a contradiction in terms) is alone enough to shove this all back in the closet. The rainbow flag should be every bit as taboo as the hammer and sickle.
You don't get to decide to stop partway down the slippery slope. Either you slide all the way to the hell at the bottom or you climb painfully all the way back up.
Reckon I can just wear real grippy boots
Right. Not going to work to say JK Rowling is a hero but Jack Philips deserves what he gets. Then they just laugh and say, eh, just give us another decade to indoctrinate the kids and JK will be where Jack is.
Plenty of people consider those two in exactly the same boat. Do you think there's a widespread perception that Philips deserves the harassment he's endured? Seems the opposite from where I'm sitting.
The majority of Americans of all stripes do not often think deeply about the sexual relationships of modal gay men. If they did, the rate of acceptance would be much, much lower.
One doesn't have to think deeply about them. One only has to to know how homosexuals really behave sexually. The facts are horrifying to normal people.
"In light of this new normal and in commemoration of its last official day, it’s worth pausing and asking how we got here. When did it become essential that my neighborhood pet store fly a flag celebrating sexual minorities? Am I to understand that gay or transgender individuals are implicitly not welcome to buy dog food at a store lacking such symbolry? It’s close to ubiquitous in many parts of my city (namely the places the nice white progressives cluster), as common to see on a shop door as the opening hours. As an urgent symbol of protest or reassurance it’s flatly contradictory, flying as it does in neighborhoods where the question of gay acceptance is as close to settled as any social issue ever can be. In practice the flag is as incongruous and anachronistic as a sign proudly proclaiming “We do not discriminate by race: Negros and Chinamen welcome to shop here.” Further, its quotidian nature, its sheer humdrum commonness, robs it of any ability to communicate any vital difference in the establishments that display it. It has all the explanatory power of a lighted no-smoking placard on an airplane in 2025. So why must my dentist’s office be, in some small but public measure, queer?"
Since we are Scott Alexander-posting, I think we know the answer to this question as well:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
As an aside, I am both frustrated by the expanding number of progress pride flags and relieved by them. The sooner the plain-Jane rainbow flag is removed from the progressive orthodoxy, the sooner I am able to identify which rainbow-colored books are LGBTQIA2S+ propaganda vs. which are simply brightly-colored children's books.
As the father of a 6-year old girl who is currently extremely oppressed by the patriarchy in her aesthetics (eg "she loves rainbows and unicorns and pink and mermaids and princesses"), it's kind of amusing to think we might reach a point where her preferred color doesn't have sexual valences anymore
“It is almost unthinkable for most urban Americans to imagine a main street festooned with explicitly religious iconography in the same places pride flags now fly”
Bro forgot about the month of December
Before 1960 or so you might have had a point. Christmas celebrations have been chiefly secular for decades. You will absolutely not find icons of the virgin in your local coffeeshop, and the nativity scene outside city hall was sued into oblivion long ago.
To be fair, pride flags aren’t “explicitly religious” either, though.
No, but are making a moral statement that is at odds with the dominant religious beliefs of the country. Less true than it used to be, attitudes are shifting.
Santa Claws is not religious. Now Semana Santa introduced into our Cities could prove interesting. The pride is the pride of lucifer. The followers are deceived and will hustle into hell with puzzled looks on their unthinking faces. So we should pray for them. Thought for the Day.
It’s interesting how Christmas is accepted as a mass consumer holiday, while Easter continues to stall out. You get a massive candy aisle in March with some plastic grass and baskets. The crucifixion in particular resists mainstreaming. Meanwhile Christmas has a carnival aspect and is so secularized when TV shows say a character has missed the true meaning of Christmas, 99 times out of 100 we learn the true meaning is caring or loving or maybe giving. From that 1% you get Linus reciting the Gospel and Small One, otherwise it’s back to impotently offsetting the commercial greed machine.
I feel obliged to share a few things I use when talking about the various pride flags with my kids (oldest is now 6):
1. Any flag that goes beyond the actual colors of the rainbow I describe as "rainbow vomit".
2. "If anyone asks, you can tell them that we don't believe in adding colors to the rainbow".
3. When they're old enough to ask more, I'll explain that the rainbow wasn't created a) in 1978 or b) to celebrate any group of humans.
The regular Pride flag actually removes a colour from the standard Western rainbow, taking it from 7 to 6. This is because 6 is the most important sacred number in Kabbalistic numerology: 6 stripes on the Pride flag; 6 points on the Star of David; 6 million purported victims of the Holocaust; etc.
You can find some more sacred connotations of 6 here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/whats-in-a-number-6/
You're being somewhat facetious I think.
But in case not: the original rainbow was given a seventh fake color ("indigo") so it could have 7, since 6 was undesirable for the same reason.
Somewhat facetious, yes. Esoteric reasons are amusing and indicative rather than determinative.
The 7 was chosen by Newton for esoteric reasons (Newton wrote more on alchemy and numerology than on physics, and was at best a heterodox Christian), but those reasons were unrelated to the Jewish mystical significance of 6. Prior to Newton, the rainbow was usually seen as having 5 colours (e.g. Boyle, 1664). Wikipedia has a reasonably good summary, which also explains that indigo isn't “fake”, it's just that Newton used different terminology than we do (blue = cyan, indigo = blue): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Number_of_colours_in_a_spectrum_or_a_rainbow
The question is why, after several centuries of stability, the 7th colour was removed for such an odd cause as homosexual liberation. Just as Newton's choice of esoteric 7 was a reflection of the beliefs that motivated him, so the queer activists' choice of the sacred number 6 was a reflection of the beliefs that motivated them. Since so many leaders of the movement were of Jewish ethnicity (as queer Jewish groups are proud to admit), it is hardly bizarre to hypothesise that their reverence for the number 6, ingrained in them from the cradle, was a motivation for this unusual choice to change the then-standard number of colours.
I keep wondering when the concept of genetic engineering will enter into the discussion around the pride flag. I don't know if there is a conspiracy or just an emergence, like the advent of powered, controlled flight, but if I wanted to prepare humans for accepting genetic engineering, I'd have to destroy the current system. The current system is one where a man and woman each provide 50% of the genetic material of a child which they then dedicate their energies to bringing to adulthood. But with genetic engineering, the child might have any number of sources of genetic material, some of them perhaps not human or only the product of a laboratory. Who would be the mom and the dad then? I sincerely apologize for suggesting some sort of conspiracy, I don't think there is one. I don't know. It could just be the natural result of us knowing of the existence of DNA. Do we really think that the genetic makeup of babies will be determined by two teenagers at a high school prom for the next thousand years?
You should read the work of Jennifer Bilek, here on Substack. I think you'll find it interesting
we can already (kind of) do this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_replacement_therapy
The truth is this: in all likelihood there will be some kind of backlash. What form it takes I do not know. But it is like an old rubber band. Basically I doubt sodomy laws will come back, but is suspect there will be a general agreement that LGBTQ have to basically get in the closet again, but they will be allowed to come out occasionally.
The thing is this: people generally want their families to continue. Anyone who does not will have their family end.
Those left will win simply by showing up.
No, “anti-LGBT” laws are not being passed across the country. States are outlawing child sex changes. Lump those two things together at your peril.
People often bring up cost as the reason for falling birth rates, but it’s not true and never has been. This is easily demonstrated by observing that fertility is inversely correlated with income, within countries and between countries.
Once the moral crusaders have saved their latest victim from oppression they get bored and move on to their next minority. In an open and compliant society they will quickly run out of victims to save so it's uncertain what they will do to keep themselves occupied.
Thankfully, the whole thing seems to have been dialed down this year. At least in my neck of the woods.
But, when implemented at scale, it's basically Rainbow Nuremberg.
Banger
I think the comments on this post are proof enough that the pride flag will always be taken as an explicitly political statement, and that gay rights will always need defending. Sure, being pro-LGBTQ+ is now the default position, but I think as we get further into the (justified) backlash against extreme trans activists, gay marriage and public acceptance of gay couples may get swept up in the meantime.
I generally agree with you though, that people who fly the hideous chevron flag (complete with black and brown lines and the intersex symbol) or put up those "In this house we believe..." signs, are not trying to make a political statement, and instead are just signalling their in-group status. This is a big problem with the left right now. That is, the idea that we've "won," and that we no longer need to engage our hateful and stupid opponents, that we only need to signal our in-group status to other leftists.
I got banned from a subreddit for liberal gun owners for making a much milder version of this observation, that all those rainbows and BLM fists actually do signal something political. It was in the context of their daily thread about Trump merch at the gun store and how that makes them feel unwelcome, and apparently they didn't appreciate the parallel.
I can’t believe somebody would be banned from a subreddit for pointing out a contradiction in the dominant ideology. First time I’ve heard of something like that happening.
"sex change surgeries"
This is a technically incorrect phrase. Sex in mammals cannot be "changed" by any means, surgical or otherwise. I suggest "sex-trait modification surgeries" as a more accurate phrasing.
I don't really see the difference between these flags and American flags. Hanging up a US flag does not mean I endorse all actions of the US government. A lot of the complaints in this piece remind me of left-wing complaints about American flags being everywhere . There are some merit to both sets of complaints, but ultimately I don't think it matters much, you just tune it out eventually.
There are places where American flags persist as dominant symbol of the civic religion, but no major metro. And those places are more marginal every year.
the flags are everywhere but they are no longer register as a "dominant symbol of the civic religion" because their ubiquity leads to banality, and the meaning fades. The same will happen with pride flags, just give it time.
Maybe, certainly not the case when it is under active revision and additions in real time. Not the sign that a symbol is on the way out.
yep. among some of my more progressive friends the basic rainbow flag is considered almost reactionary and you need at one of ones with the triangle on the left side (forget what they are called). Some thing on the other side with the American flag. It's too blasé now, you need a Gadsden flag, a thin blue line flag, or one of those pine tree ones to really get the message across
But I think my point still stands because it's all noise to me, and seeing any of these flags does not affect my daily life at all. (I do mostly like seeing pride flags because I think it's a sign of social progress, and I mostly like seeing American flags because it helps reassure me I did not accidentally wander in Canada, but if you took the flags away my life would be no better or worse)
In the eastern reaches of Bushwick, Brooklyn, American flags significantly outnumber pride flags. (And Old Glory is getting more common.) Although to be fair, Puerto Rican flags outnumber both of them by lot.
Hmm. Am I at risk in Blue America by being AFAICT the only person to comment here under their real name?
The whole idea that this would never get to the kids is the height of self-delusion. Grooming and pederasty are the norm in the gay community. The has been the case since ancient times.
Sullivan and others, assuming they were honest in the first place, were the extreme exception to the reality that older gay men prey on younger men, often minors, in the hopes of having a sexual relationship with them. We all repeat the mindless mantra that “love is love,” but this is a very different kind of love than the kind that leads to marriage and children.
I think there's a case to be made that Sullivan and others like him are aware of this behavior and condemn it as part of the campaign for normalization and equal rights. Social media and pride parades aren't doing them any favors on this front.
It's nothing compared to the gender ideology push though. Gay teenage boys getting groomed by older men is one thing, your six old daughter being told by her teacher that she might be a boy born into the wrong body is another. Both bad, but one is a very different kind of threat to a typical parent.