Enough of Pride–It’s a Sin

That event was the unfortunate apotheosis of a movement that surfaced in 1970 with the first Gay Pride Liberation March, more justifiable then as a protest against discrimination. Twenty-nine years later, the first Gay Pride Month was declared by Bill Clinton in 1999.

It’s now 2023, making it 53 years of such events in all parts of our country and in many other nations that have imitated us.

But this isn’t just about gays or the LGBT, etc., crowd.

For the record, I oppose all Pride Months for whatever group you pick—black, white, green or heliotrope, Irish, Greek, Italian, or Singaporean.

And I’m certainly not the first to do so. In 2005, Morgan Freeman had the following exchange with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes”:

“You’re going to relegate my history to a month? I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history,’ Freeman told CBS News.

When Wallace asked Freeman how to end racism, his answer was straightforward:

“Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man,” Freeman said. “And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You wouldn’t say, Well, I know this white guy named Mike Wallace. You know what I’m sayin’?”

I sure do know what you’re “sayin’,” Morgan. (Unfortunately, the zeitgeist forced the great actor to walk back some of his intelligent analysis.)

Black Pride, Gay Pride, White Pride, it’s all the same—wrong. Very wrong.

Pride is a sin, one of the Seven Deadly or Capital Sins that are greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth, and pride.

While this list of sins—of which I and most other people are guilty at one time or another—comes from the Catholic tradition, they are mirrored in many ways by most of the world’s great religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, other Christian faiths, and so forth.

The seven sins connect directly to the Ten Commandments in ways I needn’t explain to readers here. The writings of Falun Gong leader Li Hongzhi also contain many similar teachings, notably about pride and its karmic dangers.

Most interesting, pride is considered the worst of the sins. Wikipedia (which, admittedly, we must always read with care) has this to say:

“Pride has been labeled the father of all sins and has been deemed the devil’s most essential trait. C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity that pride is the ‘anti-God’ state, the position in which the ego and the self are directly opposed to God:

“‘Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. Pride is understood to sever the spirit from God, as well as His life-and-grace-giving Presence.’”

Wow. Back in the ’60s in some marijuana smoke-filled room, one might have said: “Heavy …” Ironically, as I recall, most of us then loved Lewis. His Narnia books were popular, even on the left. Little attention is paid to him now by the same people.

The gay and black movements both are currently in their Jacobin phase in the schema of the French Revolution, not practicing beheadings but with censorship and coercion, which are the intellectual and emotional equivalents. Causes that began as righteous became extremist and nonsensical. Pride events are rammed endlessly down on our throats in a manner that almost seems designed to promote intolerant reactions, to prove we were sexist or homophobes all along, even when we weren’t.

The similarities with Black Lives Matter are extraordinary. You’re a racist even if you think you’re not, even if you marched with Dr. King.

No one has ever accused me of being particularly religious, and I haven’t been. But if you are bragging, acting with hubris as the ancient Greeks termed Pride, you are doing, as Lewis explained, the devil’s work.

The good news is that it won’t succeed.  It contains the seeds of its own demise in one of the best-known of all biblical proverbs: “Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall,” later shortened to “Pride goes before the fall.”

We’ve known it all along.

First published in the Epoch Times.