The Abomination Which Causeth Desolation
I’m now concluding my series on Pride month celebrations. It began with my case for why Pride is in reality a pro-life idea, and I rebutted a number of common Catholic objections to Pride in the second installment. I intentionally waited until after June ended to finish this series; I did not care to post any critiques or concessions during Pride month, partly to drive home the point that the critiques and concessions could wait. So with those first two posts and the intentional delay in this series in mind, yes, there are critiques of Pride celebrations that I’ll grant.
To begin with: they are held out-of-doors, a location that is also a known vector of insects. Why no organized resistance to this practice has arisen, I don’t know. In any case I must admit that it is a valid objection.
The Seventh Cornice
More seriously, yes, they tend to be pretty lewd. This isn’t universal—regional culture, regional LGBTQ culture specifically, and other factors do play a role, and there are sometimes specifically family-oriented Pride events. But most Pride celebrations do involve a lot of revealing clothing and suggestive behavior, and some tolerate things like public nudity or, ahem, more. For those Catholics who are deeply concerned about the immorality of all this, I have some recommendations later on this post.
A Graver Evil
Thirdly, since the turn of the century or so, Pride parades have very much gotten tangled up in the corporate sponsorship game. Now, I want to be clear here so I’m not misunderstood. If your reaction to this is an incredulous laugh and a question like “What, are you seriously saying you’re mad that Pride has been commercialized?”, my answer is “Absolutely yes.”
That LGBTQ culture, in the context of our broader American culture, should be seized upon by capitalism as yet another way to make money is of course inevitable. I mean, hell, we have mass-marketed Che Guevara t-shirts; clearly nothing is sacred. But it sure doesn’t follow that I have to like it. It disgusts me to see something I find important not just treated cynically, but so treated by cynics while they pretend—even, sometimes, to themselves—that their care is genuine.
A Digression
This disgust carries a different melancholy with it, too: a reminder of how few of my fellow Catholics care what the Church’s teaching about economics is. I’ll admit, I’m pretty bitter about this. My bitterness touches on one of the things that I think is actually part of queer Catholics’ collective cross to bear.1 Despite how distant a digression this is, I’m going to spend a few moments on my envy of straight Catholics.
It’s difficult to see here, but in the Purgatorio, the penance of the envious is to have their eyes (which looked spitefully upon God’s creation) wired shut. (The above image comes from an 1835 painting by one Hippolyte Flandrin.)
Envy isn’t a comfortable thing to admit to. There’s a reason the jealous little fussbudget stamping his foot in impotent rage is a common cartoon joke—and to passions that take themselves as seriously as envy, being a laughingstock is the worst fate imaginable.
You might assume this is an I wish I was normal kind of envy. But the truth is, I like being weird, always have. I don’t envy straight Catholics for their heterosexuality. I sometimes envy the fact that they can have children—but in me, that tends to produce self-pity, not spitefulness.
The envy is about this. Despite the trash-fire that is my moral life, I am a fully orthodox Catholic, about homosexuality as much as anything else, yet I still get insulted and accused of heresy constantly, mostly by complete strangers who’ve never had to walk a day in my shoes and never will. Meanwhile, straight Catholics who want to can openly flout and contradict the entire Catholic tradition on economics; they can make whole careers out of doing so; and not only do they not receive discipline or even much criticism, they are positively upheld as champions of orthodoxy. Because of what I’ve invested my ego in—namely, being a religious person on the internet—that stings. That makes me mad.
Basically I want to be remembered as a humble devotee of Christ and the saints who bravely
put himself on combox duty, lest God’s Church be overcome by people who are wrong online.
But I have digressed quite a bit from the topic of reasonable criticisms of Pride festivities. I can hear the protestations:
“Hey Wait a Second, Go Back to the Lewd Part!”
Blah blah blah, envy this, Church teaching that—a second ago you just admitted that Pride celebrations are sexual! Aren’t you confessing that your precious “queer identity” stuff really is about sex?
Still no. For one thing, there are plenty of other celebrations in American culture—and, indeed, non-celebrations, like beach trips or car commercials—where it’s normal for things to get sexually suggestive. Are Christians allowed to go to the beach? And I’ve yet to hear of Catholics discouraging people from watching the Superbowl because the cheerleaders and halftime show performers tend to wear skimpy outfits.
Now, if we’re talking about public nudity or even public sex, that’s different. I (like many queer people!) consider those things objectionable.2 But “public sex/nudity” is in no sense whatsoever equivalent to, or necessary for, or inherently linked with, Pride parades. They’re just not. Even when they occur, public nudity or sex bear approximately the same relationship to Pride as rabble-rousing for the GOP does with the March for Life: the link between them has far more to do with the history and structure of our specific society than with what either march is in principle.
By all means, criticize people if they are in fact violating public decency. But do that in response to evidence, not assumptions. Making rude, damaging assumptions about people without due cause is unjust and profoundly unchristian behavior in itself. If, on top of that, you have the audacity to bring the force of law against people based on assumptions you won’t even investigate, I don’t want to hear anything you have to say about morality, because yours is manifestly disordered in the extreme.
Vegans Protest New Meat Market
I bet you thought that I’d forgotten about Unicorn Guy. That you were safe.
As for sexual immodesty in general, it’s reasonable enough to object to that. I’ll even grant that society probably benefits from sexual modesty, though I do think we should note that this is not a major concern in the New Testament (modesty there reliably refers to avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth, not of one’s figure). What is certainly not reasonable, from a Catholic point of view, is to make only the kinds of sexual immodesty that you’re not interested in the object of public criticism.
And anyway, however reasonable it is to object, it shouldn’t shock us that a festival populated largely by non-Catholics doesn’t make a point of observing Catholic standards of modest dress. I have never understood what Catholics imagine themselves to be accomplishing by pearl-clutching about this. You can’t expect people to agree that it’s important to uphold standards of conduct they think are destructive, pointless, or trivial. And if you’re trying to persuade anybody of anything, you can’t do it by pointing out that on your premises, they are wrong. I mean … duh. That’s literally what you’re having a conversation about. You have to offer them something—ideally, some reason to trust your intelligence and good will before you start making demands from them.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
It would, incidentally, be unkind of me to quote H. G. Wells at this juncture: “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” Of course, Catholics who casually address people as homo and sodomite can be safely presumed not to set great store by kindness or courtesy, so I assume they won’t mind.
I’m not saying here that I think all Catholic critics of Pride are self-hating closet cases. (That seems hard to sustain for statistical reasons if nothing else.) But I do think a lot of them are envious of the good time they believe we, the queers, are having. They seem sometimes like they hate Pride as a reminder that being the class goody-two-shoes is its own reward: in other words, the real prizes go to the other kids.
If you think that analogy measures value rather crassly, you are correct! But however old we get, however sophisticated our minds and manners, and however well we conceal it, there’s probably a part of us that feels that way. Most of us, I think, have matured to the point where we do sincerely want things like the satisfaction of a job well done or the peace of mind brought on by conceding a worthless argument. Some of us may even enjoy those things more than ice cream; but everyone still wants ice cream,3 and I think most of us, deep down, would prefer the obvious pleasure to the mature one. Unrestrained sexual self-indulgence (whether real or imagined) seems like a very good time; but Catholicism is here for a long time, not a good time.
What Shall We Then Do?
Okay, so how are we supposed to stop Pride then!?
We’re not.
Stopping people from doing things you don’t like is not the gospel. It is not necessarily forbidden by the gospel in every case; but it is your pet political project, not a precept of the Church. To assign it the value of a Christian duty is to take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Footnotes
1I take our Lord’s statement about bearing our crosses to be referring, not to the normal hardships of life, but to peculiarly spiritual griefs that are usually unjust in some way. (The relevant passages are Luke 14.25-33 and Matthew 16.21-27.) Crosses were not among the normal hardships of life for the peasants and clerks of first-century Palestine, i.e. the classes people that Christ mostly addressed. They were, on the contrary, as exceptional and hideous as the electric chair. Saying “Take up your cross daily and follow me” would have sounded pretty much like “Submit to waterboarding daily and follow me.” The tone of the modern saying “we all have our crosses to bear” makes crosses sound ordinary to the point of triviality; and judging from my conversations with other believers, it’s this proverb and not the Gospel texts which influences our idea of “carrying your cross” the most.
2Interestingly, there is a strong argument from the kink community itself against public displays of this kind. Contrary to widespread belief, kinksters are as a rule very alive to the importance of consent, and one of the oft-repeated principles of practicing kink of any kind is that witnesses are participants, meaning that they need to consent too. To impose a kink spectacle upon an unsuspecting public is therefore strictly unethical.
Note that this does not have anything to do with drag queens. Drag is not a kink—I imagine there must be people who fetishize it, but only because basically everything is fetishized by someone. Drag is simply a cross-gender performance persona, and no more inherently sexual than Terry Jones dressed as a mud-spattered peasant woman in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
4No exceptions. Everyone.
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