Monday, June 9, 2025

Part I

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A Brief History of Pride Month and the Pride Flag – How Did This Happen, and What Does It Mean in 2025?

Since 1978, the month of June has been designated as Pride Month, and of course that now means LGBTQ pride. It began as part of a gay rights movement, but as we now understand fully it is an expansive movement often referred to now as LGBTQIA+, that plus sign a reminder of things yet to come. But as we’re thinking about Pride Month, let’s just remind ourselves that this is an artificial observance. That doesn’t mean it’s less real, but it does mean it didn’t come out of any, say, concerted societal plan to set aside a month for some kind of designation. No, it was political activism. But that also tells us a lot about how political activism drives moral change in our culture. It was LGBTQ activists who pressed for the designation of Pride Month, and we should note historically where they pressed their case.

First of all, they pressed their case in two arenas. Arena number one, government. And so they were looking for friendly governments and that really began with neighborhood and city governments in places like California, eventually extended also to states. They put pressure on politicians to set aside this month as observation of what had been, they claimed, to be invisible gay populations, thus Gay Pride Month. The second thing that they did was to direct their attention to the corporate community. They demanded that businesses… And in many cases they did the opposite here, rather than beginning locally and then working nationally, they began nationally bringing pressure on huge nationwide corporations, some of the biggest brands in the United States. You had worker activism, you had political activism. It all came together and pretty soon you had a Pride Month movement. Now, a couple of things about this. Let’s just consider the two words.

Number one, pride. How does pride become the synonym or the single word, the symbol for so much in this massive moral revolution? It is because the central to the moral claim of the LGBTQ revolutionaries, and for that matter the general context of the sexual revolutionaries, their claim is that behaviors that should not be shameful had been designated as shameful, relationships that should not have been shameful have been treated as shameful, and thus the way to recover moral sanity is by asserting pride. So pride wasn’t an accident here. It was the distillation of an agenda. It wasn’t just the normalization of homosexual acts or homosexual behaviors and relationships, it was the celebration of the same. You’ll notice that it isn’t tolerance month, it’s not acceptance month, it’s not normalization month, it is Pride Month. Now, let’s just pause here for a moment to say theologically, this is incredibly clarifying.

It’s clarifying to know that pride is at the heart of the LGBTQ movement and thus we have a biblical theology about pride that not only identifies pride as a very significant sin, but in many ways in the Western theological tradition, pride is understood in biblical theology to be the first and foremost sin. The central temptation in the garden was the temptation to be like God. And so in an astounding way, Christians understand that there’s an accidental honesty here. When the LGBTQ activist community refers to this month as Pride Month, their choice of the word pride indicates the very heart of the problem. It’s pride in that which should bring no pride at all. It’s the primal sin of pride set forth as the centerpiece of an entire movement. The second issue here is month, because there are a lot of days, there are days set aside for all kinds of different issues and needs and movements, and you also have just weeks sometimes that are set apart.

But Pride Month was ambitious from the very beginning and it isn’t an attempt to try to just claim as much of the calendar as possible. So it’s not just Gay Pride Day or even Gay Pride Week, it is Gay Pride Month. Now, there’s something else behind this. Carl Truman is right when he says that activist movements like this, they want to claim as much time and space as possible. And that’s exactly what is behind Pride Month, the attempt to claim, to lay a hold upon, time and space in society. That’s one way of bringing about vast moral change. 

There are two or three really important developments in 2025 that should have our attention, but there’s also an historical background. And you can count on USA Today to be just about as vocal as possible in pushing this kind of agenda, that’s what they do. Olivia Munson wrote a column for USA Today with the title “Its Pride 2025: Get To Know The History Of The Rainbow Flag.” The rainbow flag has become ubiquitous as a symbol of the gay Pride movement. Sadly, it’s hanging outside many liberal churches as well. But Munson writes this, “Since its creation in 1978, the Pride flag has become a universal symbol for the LGBTQ+ community. It represents visibility and hope and reflects the diversity within the LGBTQ+ community.” Now, that’s kind of laughable. It’s hard not to laugh when you read it. You’re talking about something that calls itself the LGBTQ+ community and it wants to find pride in its diversity. That’s pretty ridiculous when you think about it. Any movement that calls itself LGBTQIA, whatever, plus doesn’t have to say out loud, “It’s about diversity.” 

But we’re then given some fairly, well, I’ll just say interesting background for the pride flag back to 1978. Here’s what the original colors meant. Hot pink referred to sex, red pointed to life, orange symbolized healing, yellow meant sunlight, green meant nature, turquoise meant magic, indigo meant serenity and purple meant spirit. Yeah, they’ve thought this through. But that was the original flag. It had eight different stripes and eight different colors, but the current Pride flag has only six colors. It’s not that they wanted to drop colors. We are told that the additional two colors are simply two expensive. So we are told now that the revised gay Pride flag has the colors red that means life, orange that means healing, yellow means sunlight, green means nature, blue means serenity, and purple means spirit. Evidently, hot pink and indigo were just too expensive, go figure. An activist named Gilbert Baker was assigned the task of coming up with the flag. He said, “We needed something beautiful, something from us.” And he went on to say, “The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things.” The most relevant words there, of course, are “all of those things.”

Erik Piepenburg, writing for the New York Times offered an article with the headline, “It’s Time To Step Out And Join The Celebrations,” the subhead, “A Month Of Pride Parades, Protests, Dance Parties, And Drag Shows Galore.” So you’re missing in New York City, the drag shows galore. There’s a section in the article entitled “Take the Kids,” and one of the events listed there is something known as well, a program, “Quiet Queers Pajama Party.” I’ll just leave that to the imagination.

Part II

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A Few Corporations Back Off Pride Month: The U.S. Is Going to Need Much More to Return to Any Semblance of Sanity On This Issue

There’s another interesting development in all of this, and that has to do with the fact that World Pride has been located this year in Washington D.C. That’s a movement that moves around the world. And two years ago it was determined that in 2025 it would be hosted in our nation’s capital city. But as Campbell Robertson and others have worded in this case for the New York Times, that was without the anticipation that Donald J. Trump would be once again the President of the United States and in the White House. That has presented some complications for World Pride in the nation’s capitol.

And that situation is now being blamed on the fact that some of the celebrations had to be cut back, and some of the money expected did not come in. When it comes to world pride in Washington D.C. In 2025, we are told that President Trump has loomed over it all. “He issued executive orders that bar transgender people from serving in the military and that restrict gender identities on travel documents. Private companies scaled back or shut down diversity programs. State lawmakers introduced and in some cases passed resolutions calling on the US supreme Court to reverse the ruling allowing same-sex marriage, reflecting the views of a growing majority of Republicans.” So there you have the ominous situation painted that with Donald Trump in the White House Washington is now, well, not a hospitable place for World Pride 2025. 

But honestly as relevant as the Trump administration is in terms of complicating this factor, the reality is that many corporations seem to be trying to back out of their public involvement very deep and sometimes deep pocket involvement in Pride events. That’s another big story that’s coming out in press reports, a lot of big corporations are no longer the marquee endorsers and sponsors for Pride events. And in some cases they are blaming the White House and political pressure, but even some inside the gay pride movement are looking at this and LGBTQ activists are saying, “Well, that’s a little inconvenient. It really looks like they’re just trying to back down.” And here’s where something is very interesting as we observe what’s going on in the culture. So many of these corporations when they thought it was popular, really got out on the leading edge. Now, a company like L’Oreal, the cosmetic company by the way, is steadfast and continuing its same level of support, but it’s very interesting to see how many other major brands have decided, “Maybe this isn’t the best thing we could do with that money. Maybe this isn’t building our brand but is actually costing us.”

And that gets to another big story out of Pride Month 2025, and that is Target. That is to say the discount store Target. Because Target, you remember having sided so much with Pride Month, having in recent years come out with an entire spectrum of products that it just put in the faces of its customers, and yet it began to back off of that. Now, you also have Target saying that it is going to back out of some of the activism it has been involved with, even in terms of, say, putting forth particular product lines from explicitly gay vendors. So even as a matter of just a couple of years ago, Target was, well, the subject of absolute outrage on the part of many conservative Christians and quite justifiably so. Now they’re being boycotted by some in the LGBTQ movement who accuse target of backing off of their corporate commitments.

Now, here’s a big lesson. American corporations once knew better than to involve themselves in this kind of cause because it wasn’t their proper line of business. They seem to have forgotten that in more recent years, but now perhaps they’re recovering a bit of sanity. The New York Times ran an article by Campbell Robertson with the headline, “The World Celebrates Pride At The Capitol In The Shadow Of The White House.” We’re told in this article, “While the developments of the past four months have presented one challenge after another, some LGBTQ people said that Pride this year was in some ways returning to its roots as a gathering in defiance of official hostility.” “Pride started out as a protest,” said Zach Renovátes, a co-owner of Bunker, an LGBTQ nightclub in D.C. The Times tells us, “Pride marches arose out of the riots after the police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City in June, 1969.”

In the decade since the gay rights movement has come so far that some began to question the necessity of Pride celebrations. One activist said that the attitude then was this, “There were people actually saying, ‘We’ve won. What’s the need?'” But then The Times says things changed quickly. “The hasty retreat of companies that had long expressed support for gay rights suggested to some that perhaps the support of mainstream corporate America never ran that deep.”

Well, is that true or is it false? The fact is we may never know. But we do know that at one point these corporations, which are automatically by definition concerned with their bottom line, thought that they would build their customer base by taking this kind of activist role. They now seem to believe the opposite. Is this a continuing trend? Well, time will tell, but the reality is at least big business is going to have to count the cost of being marquee supporters of Pride Month, and evidently some at least are pulling back some of that level of support.

But at this point, I feel that I have to say to conservative Christians, as encouraging as some of this might be, the reality is that we have lost so much ground that it’s going to take many developments like this even to return to something like the status quo in terms of where we were before, say, Pride Month and the LGBTQ movement made such headway. The reality is that if anything, this might be only a bump in the road, so to speak, for LGBTQ activism. We have to hope that it’s more than that. We have to hope that there’s some return to moral sanity here. But when we look at this kind of activism, we need to see that in a single year you really don’t know which direction these things are going.

Part III

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Vietnam Has a Big Birth Rate Problem: Vietnam Attempts to Reverse the Disaster of Its 2-Child Policy

At this point, I want to shift to a very different issue and a very different place. We’re going to shift from the United States to the nation of Vietnam. Over the course of the last several days, repeated headlines have come telling us that Vietnam’s communist regime has officially rescinded its two-child policy. Now, this is in essence good news, but let’s remember how this policy came to be. It all began with China’s infamous one-child policy developed even earlier out of concerns of overpopulation. A little footnote here, some of that driven by western governments communicating with the communist authorities in China, China saw a growing population, indeed, the word was then the exploding population, as the great threat to its future. And so it put into place a one-child only policy, a draconian policy that’s in defiance not only of population statistics, it’s in defiance of creation order, for example, in the Book of Genesis. But nonetheless, it has been in place, and of course it led to all kinds of horrifying distortions.

For one thing, given the fact that there was a preference for boys, there was the virtual elimination of female births in many situations. Or even where the girls were born, they didn’t survive. The families wanted overwhelmingly to have boys, and this has led to what’s called the broken branches in China for all those decades, and that’s young men who have no hope whatsoever of getting married. Let’s just say that’s an unnatural situation, but it’s one that was humanly constructed. It’s one that came about by Communist Party ideology, but we also need to notice that in a state like Vietnam, the one-child policy became a two-child policy, but now the two-child policy has been rescinded largely en toto. Now, one of the things we note is that in Vietnam, this policy was mostly applicable to those who were members of the Communist Party. But remember, in a communist regime, membership in the party is everything.

It enables you to have access to jobs, to education, to freedoms and all kinds of other things that normal people don’t have. But now the Communist Party has rescinded its own self-regulation in Vietnam of just two children. NPR reported, “Vietnam has scrapped a policy that limited couples to have up to two children as it addresses a declining birth rate and a shrinking working-age population.” We’re told that last Tuesday, Vietnamese lawmakers “passed new amendments to the population law, leaving it up to families to decide how many children they are going to have.”

Part IV

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Birth Rate Issues are Fundamentally a Theological Problem: The Rejection of God’s Glory in Human Procreation Will Never Lead to Human Flourishing

Now, let’s just not gloss over the fact that we’re talking here about the Communist Party and the government in Vietnam having a population law. That in essence is the heart of the problem. Limiting the size of families is not a proper government power or government responsibility. It’s an encroachment on creation order. And of course it brings disaster, and that’s exactly what has happened. In Vietnam, the national fertility rate has dropped to 1.91. Now, if that doesn’t sound disastrous, it’s because you haven’t done the math. The math is that a normal bottom line replacement rate is 2.1. If you have a fertility rate under 2.1, you have a declining population. 

But now you look at the fact that even in a nation like Vietnam, you also have a rapidly aging population. So you see this in the West or you see this even in other countries such as South Korea, which at this point seems to be facing the most acute crisis anywhere on the planet. When you have a declining population and you have people living longer, you end up with a problem at both ends of the equation. You have too many old people, not enough babies. Eventually what you have is a dysfunctional economy because if you don’t have enough babies who turn into young people who can work, then you’re going to end up with an abundance of older people who don’t work, who are in need of financial support, and the government services aren’t going to be there.

Already in some countries, they’re looking at using robots to take care of people in nursing homes because there aren’t going to be enough young people and at least by demographic concerns, there are too many, in contrast, old people. But Vietnam is at least waking up to the problem. It has rescinded a policy it never should have had. No government has the right to say to parents, “You should have this many children. You can’t have more children than that. Sanctions will be brought against you if you have more children.” It’s simple reality that has led these regimes to change the policy. It’s not some kind of moral awakening or reformation, it’s the recognition that if they don’t have more babies, the very civilization is going to cease to exist.

I mentioned to Vietnam that the replacement rate, the fertility rate has now dropped to 1.91. In other countries, it has dropped below one. By most accounting, as I said, South Korea has the lowest fertility rate. It’s 0.75. So there you’re looking at a society that will shrink fast and age even faster. It’s a demographic disaster, but as Christians look at it, we understand even before that it’s a theological and a moral disaster. But let me demonstrate that the situation is actually worse than it may first appear to be because it’s not just that the government is saying, “Okay, you can have more than two children,” it is because when you have the policies that had restricted children and restricted the number of births decades ago, you plant habits in a society and those habits are very hard to reverse. The fact is that there aren’t that many couples evidently in the nation of Vietnam who necessarily want to have more than two children now. Some of them don’t even want to have two children. This has become a lifestyle problem.

In the West, decades ago, this was described as one of the problems of lifestyle liberalism. That is to say that when you have economic income go up, you have living standards go up, oddly enough, you have the birth rate go down. It’s counterintuitive. People would say, “You have more money, you can afford to have more children,” but the fact is that in advanced economies, it doesn’t work that way. There’s a kind of decadence that is built in. You make more money, you have greater economic expectations. You then redefine having children very differently in economic terms, and it shifts from, “If we just had more money, we could have more children,” to, “Okay, now we’ve got more money. That means we have other things to do. There are other things to buy. There are other pressing concerns above having more babies.”

There are some other patterns that deserve our attention. For example, in Vietnam, the birth rate isn’t even all over the country. Ho Chi Minh City, which is the capital, has the lowest birth rate, 1.39 children per woman. So you look at that and you say, “Well, it turns out that where you have big cities, where you have political power, where you have all kinds of economic power concentrated, you don’t have people that turn around and have more children, you have couples having fewer children.” Something else to note, increasingly in societies, marriage has become so marginalized that you’re not talking about how many children couples have, but simply how many children women have. But as was the case in China, it’s still the case in Vietnam, there is a preference for boys. A lot of this has to do with economic security. Some of it has to do with even some religious beliefs, but the fact is that there’s a prejudice against girls, and the fact is that won’t work.

Now for Christians, we understand it is a defiance of the image of God. It’s a defiance of creation order. It’s a defiance of God’s plan, and thus, guess what? It doesn’t work. In recent years, Christians have begun singing a song in which all things are to be seen in terms of God’s glory and our good. And here’s where we need to recognize the two are inextricably tied together. If you deny the glory of God, it doesn’t lead to increased human good. It leads to decreased human good. When you talk about the birth rate, you’re talking about a problem, by the way, that’s not merely economic, it’s not merely political, it is in essence theological. That also becomes clear. None of this happened before the secularization of the culture, and it doesn’t happen equally when you look at the religious beliefs, culture by culture. 

Another issue, just to state it specifically, is that experience reveals that governments can use coercive power to tell couples, “You can’t have more children.” That message gets across the cultural sanctions can be put in place. But governments, it turns out, are incredibly inefficient at reversing the equation. Governments are really in no position to say to couples, “You need to have more children.” And even when governments try to bring economic incentives, quite honestly, it turns out that couples aren’t primarily motivated by the economic incentives at all. And here’s where Christians should just jump in and say, “Well, that should have been obvious in the first place because the birth rates are not highest, where the income is the highest. They’re the highest, where the income is the lowest.” It’s not primarily about the money. The biggest moral questions are never primarily about the money. Economic determinists want to say it’s always about the money, but that formula just doesn’t add up. We, as Christians, understand that the money reflects the morality. The morality is what shows through in terms of something like a birth rate.

One final point to be made here is that when you have a secularized culture or a non-Christian culture, you lose the ability to say you “should and you shouldn’t, thou shalt and thou shalt not.” When it comes to having children, that is not a divine suggestion. It is a divine command. A command, by the way, that’s followed by an entire system of commands and instructions, an entire reproductive family theology that is found in Scripture. And thus it’s not an accident, that it is a secularizing trend that at the very least goes hand in hand with a decreasing, indeed collapsing birth rate. There’s another aspect to think about this. When you look at a church that has a full nursery, guess what? That really does tell you at least something about the theology. Where it has an empty nursery, that might also tell you something very significant about the theology.

It’s a very sad thing, but it’s something we really need to note. Just to use Vietnam as an example. It tried to say to people, “Have only two children.” Now it is put in the position of begging them, “Please have two children.” It turns out, by the way, that looking across cultures, at least at this point, no government has successfully reversed this trend, not in any significant measure.