If you had told me when I was in high school that in my adult life, I would need to use my legal career to explain to other adults why drag performances and performing gender transitions on kids are harmful to children, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are.
The adults running Bud Light, Target, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and various public libraries around the country seem to cater more to the Woke crowd than the families who have built their brands for them.
And, of course, June marks the beginning of “Pride Month” where we typically watch businesses trip over themselves to see who can be first to fly the rainbow flag in their window and post the obligatory LGBT pride image online.
I wonder if this year, however, the nation has reached an over-saturation point with woke sexual ideology. I wonder if the glass house of that ideology is starting to break as the lies it is built on continue to expose themselves. (For more on that, be sure to tune into my conversation with Family Policy Alliance CEO, Craig DeRoche, TODAY at 1 pm ET / 10 am PT. We’re talking about the Dodgers, drag queens, and why we protect our kids).
As we head into June, here are the four beliefs hidden behind the “Pride” flags in your city.
- Be yourself (except change everything)
The entire theme of the month and the ideology is built on “pride”—be proud and loud about sexual ideology, sexual identity, sexual behavior and more. They claim that “LGBT pride” means being true to yourself.
But that’s not the reality. What LGBT “pride” really means is that anyone struggling to embrace their biological sex is told a dangerous lie—that they were “born in the wrong body.” So, according to LGBT ideology, being true to oneself requires halting a child’s natural progression through puberty with experimental drugs, followed by cross-sex hormones that sterilize the child and create extremely unnatural hormone levels. Often, transition culminates in surgeries that remove a child’s natural and healthy body parts.
It’s no wonder that in the long-run, children who fall victim to this lie have at best unimproved mental health outcomes after undergoing these interventions, and their long-term risk of suicide is far higher than their peers.
- You do you (except this is a one-way expressway with no off ramp)
The public face of pride is the glossy promise of freedom to do whatever you want, be whoever you want, have sex with whomever you want.
As “no rules” and “free” as that sounds, it’s not true either.
What pride really means is that you are celebrated and encouraged to “do you” if your version of yourself involves standing under the rainbow flag. If, however, you decide you want to embrace the body God gave you or honor God with your sexuality, there’s no room for that.
In every state, LGBT activist groups have fought against basic talk therapy that would help a person who wants to embrace their own biological sex or be free from unwanted same-sex attraction. In some states, they’ve been successful, so the only therapy available for someone suffering from gender dysphoria is to encourage him/her to undergo gender transition. In these states, it’s illegal to help people who want to move away from an LGBT identity.
There are two modes of transportation in Woke Land. 90 miles an hour on the “stay gay” highway with no off ramp or the high-speed, nonstop “transition train.”
- Bigotry is bad (unless it’s bigotry toward people of faith, especially Christians)
The “marketing speak” for pride is to embrace diversity, inclusivity, and tolerance.
Yet, including, tolerating and celebrating the faiths that teach every person is fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God as a man or woman—and that sex is a gift from God reserved for the relationship of marriage between a man and a woman—is not embraced.
In fact, in many cases, those faiths are mocked or rejected. This is case-in-point for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of drag queens who dress as Catholic nuns. They are known for dressing as highly sexualized versions of Jesus, Mary, and Catholic nuns; using a cross to perform a pole dance; and living by their motto “go and sin some more.”
The L.A. Dodgers have chosen to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence on their “Pride Night” with the “Community Hero Award.” To hear the full story, be sure to watch our short video TODAY at 1 pm ET/10 am PT. I sit down with Family Policy Alliance CEO Craig DeRoche to unpack exactly what happened and how this fits into our cultural moment. Don’t miss it!
- Be Out & Proud (unless you, your school, and your doctor need to hide your gender transition from your parents)
Out, Proud & Loud—that’s the mantra. But, apparently, this doesn’t apply when the person “coming out” happens to be a child whose parents have very real concerns about their child identifying as LGBT.
Parents who express concern about their child undergoing irreversible gender transitions, the state of their child’s mental health and more are the enemy, according to Woke doctrine.
For these parents, the Woke crowd teaches that insurance, doctor’s offices, and even schools should keep a child’s gender transition secret from them. Some states, like California and Minnesota, have even passed laws that if a child struggling to embrace their biological sex comes to those Woke states, the state will take custody of that child (stripping custody away from his/her parents in their home state) in order to perform a gender transition.
In any other case, this would be considered kidnapping.
The pride flag may seem like a vibrant display of positive values for businesses and consumers to rally behind, but it’s really a cover-up for dangerous ideology that is destroying lives and families.
That’s why businesses that choose to display the pride flag in June aren’t making a harmless business decision, and we should call them out for it.
Join me and Family Policy Alliance’s CEO, Craig DeRoche, for a short video where we chat about Pride month, Bud Light, Target, the L.A. Dodgers and drag queens, and how to navigate it all.
WATCH TODAY on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube!
10:00am PT / 11:00am MT / 12:00pm CT / 1:00pm ET
(Seeing this late? You can still watch at the links below or by clicking on this image!)
Not on YouTube? Watch on Facebook!
Craig and his wife are parents of three daughters, and my husband and I have two daughters. We also discuss raising daughters in a world where drag shows openly mock women and where normally adult-content-only drag performances are peddled to children.
Standing with you,
Autumn Leva
Sr. Vice President of Strategy
P.S. If you haven’t yet, be sure to sign our petition to the Los Angeles Dodgers, urging them not to award the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. You can easily add your name and every individual signer’s petition will be instantly sent to the Dodgers’ email inbox through our action center.
Thank you!
You probably know by now that June is being celebrated as LGBTQ Pride Month. The purpose of the month is to celebrate and promote the LGBT culture, to recognize the Stonewall riots that happened in 1969, and to acknowledge the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on local, national, and international history and culture. Have LGBTQ individuals made significant contributions to our society? Undoubtedly.
Let me state at the outset that I have no animosity towards members of the LGBTQ community. I’ve said it before, but will restate, that I have friends who identify as LGBTQ and I love them dearly. As you might imagine, we don’t talk politics too often, but that’s ok with all of us. If those who identify as LGBTQ want to celebrate their lifestyle, they are certainly entitled to do so, given the freedoms in our country. However, there is a larger issue I want to address: our country’s transformation that has led us to Pride Month.
For those of us who have lived a few decades, we have the benefit of hindsight. While it’s not always the 20/20 it’s purported to be, it does often help put things in perspective and give insights not readily observed when things happen in real time.
In the 1980s, the LGBTQ movement came out of the shadows in many ways as something that needed to be recognized, whether one agreed with it or not. Americans were asked implicitly and sometimes explicitly to accept that the LGBTQ community was part of society, and Americans did, under the premise of pluralism and the freedoms embodied in our country’s foundational beliefs (which are rooted in Christian thought, by the way).
As time moved along, the focus shifted. During the latter ‘80s and early ‘90s the topic became HIV/AIDs. Disproportionately affecting those who identified as LGBTQ, due to lifestyle choices, the disease ravaged the community and Americans were soon forced to focus on a cure for this terrible disease. While HIV/AIDs certainly did put the LGBTQ identity in the spotlight, it also engendered much research, medical attention, and eventually some level of empathy for those suffering from the disease.
There were also high-profile cases such as tennis player Arthur Ashe and Ryan White who contracted HIV from blood transfusions, highlighting that nobody was entirely protected from the disease. As a result of all these factors, our country moved from acceptance to the beginnings of empathy for the LGBTQ community.
In the 1990s, we also started to see Hollywood stars and other high-profile individuals such as Ellen DeGeneres, George Michael, Melissa Etheridge, and Tammy Baldwin, the first openly lesbian candidate ever elected to Congress, come out as gay or lesbian. The dialogue moved from advocating for medical care and empathy for those who identified as LGBTQ, to advocating for tolerance and equal rights. LGBTQ advocates stated they only wanted to be treated the same as everyone else, not as an abnormal part of society.
In the 21st century things have changed considerably. More high-profile individuals have come out as LGBTQ and more groups have surfaced to advocate for their cause. The LGBTQ movement has successfully taken over the debate terminology (e.g., you are cisgender, not simply male or female; we’ve all adopted LGBTQ, not LGBT and even add +), the media have become loud advocates for the LGBTQ cause, and businesses have been shamed into jumping on the bandwagon and virtue signaling they are not only nondiscriminatory, but sometimes unbelievably promoting of the LGBTQ lifestyle.
Those who wish to speak out against anything having to do with LGBTQ talking points are labeled homophobic, ignorant, or part of a hate group and are shamed by the media. The entertainment industry is bending over backwards to show how inclusive and accepting they are. In broadcast television, roughly 10.2% of all regular expected series characters identify as LGBT. For movies, the LGBT percentage has ranged from 14%-17% in recent years, with the percentage rising each year. That said, LGBT-identifying Americans comprise only 5.6 percent of the American public, per a recent Gallup poll. Agenda. You think?
We are now at a point where the federal government, as well as some other levels of government, actively promote and enforce the advancement of the gay and lesbian identity. Schools are being required to teach LGBT curriculum to kindergartners. The Biden Administration has indicated that boys identifying as transgender girls will be allowed to compete on girls’ athletic teams. And the list goes on.
My point in all this is not to provide a history lesson of the LGBTQ+ movement, but to show the transformation of thought and practice that has slowly and almost imperceptibly occurred over the past few decades. Our country and its value system have been led from acceptance to empathy to normalization to forced promotion of the LGBT lifestyle. And that’s how we’ve gotten to today’s celebration of LGBT Pride Month.
We have been asleep at the wheel. While the American people generally try to be accepting, our country has been led down a path where more and more demands are placed on you and your family by the LGBTQ cause – demands that now or very soon will violate your values and beliefs.
So, back to LGBTQ+ Pride Month. Should a Christian participate in the normalization of something that is actively trying to eradicate our values? No. We should be kind, always. But we should never bow to today’s social intimidation and contempt for traditional values which break down the very fabric of Liberty.
For truth,
Nathan Winters
Executive Director