Dakota Beacon

The following story was carried on Fox News. “A Michigan city near Detroit has decided against allowing Pride flags on public property after a bizarre and contentious municipal meeting. The Hamtramck City Council voted Tuesday to ban Pride flags from public flag poles due to opposition from religious groups who disagree with the ideology represented by the symbol. ‘We want to respect the religious rights of our citizens,’ said Councilmember Nayeem Choudhury. The entirety of the Hamtramck City Council is Muslim, and approximately 40% of residents were born in foreign countries.”

Such an appropriate rebuff to Pride Week, Month, Year, or whatever. It took a group of immigrants to stand up to the bullies.

Gay Pride, celebrating a gazillion non-normal sexual orientations and "identities," would never be appropriate for youngsters. The only thing distinguishing LGBTQers from other people appears to be sex. Take away their preferred sexual practices and chosen identities and suddenly Pride vanishes. They're just people with an attitude. Think of it this way. Drag queens (men) are to women what blackface performers are to Blacks.

Why must heterosexuals be inundated with Gay Pride? Who cares how people live their personal lives. But, I care a great deal when they saturate the culture and target children with their sexuality.

Left-wing movements share at least one thing in common. (And LGBTQ is a left-wing movement.) More often than not they are totalitarian in thought and action. It is not enough for some people to freely accept and tolerate LGBTQ. Everyone must be required to celebrate and rejoice in lesbianism, male homosexuality, transgenderism, and queers. That is because no left-wing movement is a tolerant movement. Compliance must be forced – or else! As a minimum, LGBTQ demands celebration displaying the “rainbow” flag and performing publicly at the White House, Veterans Administration, and other federal agencies as well as corporations.

Those of us who came of age before the 1980s were raised in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition. That tradition, although abused and tattered, was still freely accepted as the prevalent view of our sexuality. It was a private matter and we believed that our bodies were our own property, meaning that we should not be touched or controlled sexually without our consent. A person raised with this worldview inevitably believed that this ability to control his or her body was the essence of their individuality. This physical individuality denoted the very opposite of an enslaved person who ultimately lacked control over his own body. Statist regimes, of course, cannot tolerate self-ownership, which is the very antithesis of the government’s control over individuals.

However, there comes a time when the normal majority of people say, “Enough is enough.” What used to constitute a common understanding of right and wrong evaporated long ago. Are there any values remaining that lend cohesion to our society? The issue becomes one of recognizable standards seen as foundational in America society.

I am reminded of an occurrence some 3400 years ago. The Biblical record (Judges 17:6 and 21:25) declares there was no king in Israel. Israelites had rejected their God as their leader. Thus, “everyone did that which was right in their own eyes.” Leap forward 3250 years to the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. Writing in “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” he expressed the view that “God is dead.” Moreover, it was his belief that in their awfulness men had rejected God. That was the context in which God was killed. If God had established a standard of right and wrong, then with the “death of God” all standards of right and wrong go out of the window.

People need not embrace Christianity as a religion (although it wouldn’t hurt). For example, Benjamin Franklin, one of our Founding Fathers, could not be rightly called a “Christian” by any stretch. But he did recognize and accept Biblical principles as foundational to our legal and social systems as well as the Constitution.

In his well-known work “Mere Christianity,” the noted Christian C. S. Lewis describes “pride” as “the Great Sin,” “the essential vice,” “the utmost evil.” Lewis concluded, “Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness … are mere flea bites 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.”

The challenge we face today focuses how to re-establish a sense of cultural propriety.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).