We’ll miss Pride Month in the Perrins house. As you can imagine, we go big up this way. We deck the house will Pride flags and I am forever walking around my kitchen with a rainbow lanyard barking at the children that they must become ‘allies’ to whatever is the latest gender identity and sexual kink.
I can be found lecturing my teenage daughter on how she absolutely should share her personal space in public toilets and changing rooms and what have you, with men who think they are women.
This is the law in Ireland. It is self-id. If some bloke wakes up one morning thinking he is a woman you have to accept and believe he is a woman. And this bloke can just saunter into whatever female spaces he likes and compete with your daughter in female sports competitions no questions asked. And you Irish citizen must accept this otherwise you get dragged to Room 101 for The Treatment. Some politician will accuse you of a hate crime.
I think it is telling that they choose the word Pride to mark the month of June. What exactly are they proud about? That they are sexual beings – congratulations, aren’t we all. Perhaps they are celebrating achievements in the areas of civil rights such as non-discrimination and gay marriage. Okey dokey, then why don’t they just call it that. Celebrating achievements in the area of Civil, Political and Social Rights for Same Sex Attracted People month and parade. I understand that it is not as catchy as Pride. I’ll continue working on it.
Truly though if the organisers and feather boa wearers knew what Pride was, I hope they wouldn’t be celebrating it. Pride is the deadliest of all the sins. It prowls the land egging us on to indulge in our darker thoughts and even darker actions. To explain why Pride is the deadliest of all the sins, yes even lust and greed, I hand over to CS Lewis, as always.
In Mere Christianity Lewis explains, “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. 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.”
Lewis continues, “Now what you want to get clear it that Pride is essentially competitive – is competitive by its very nature – while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If someone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not.”
Do the Pride parade people take pleasure in being above the rest of us? Is that what all this marching and rainbow flag waving is about? If they do not believe they are superior to us mere heterosexuals, then they need a new name. Perhaps, Just Your Average Gay Parade or something. This is proving tricky.
Before you ask Lewis distinguishes the sin of pride from the everyday use of the word when parents often say that they are proud of their children.
“Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says, ‘Well done,’ are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, ‘I have pleased him; all is well,’ to thinking, ‘What a fine person I must be to have done it.”
Elsewhere Lewis says, “We say in English that a man is ‘proud’ of his son, or his father, or his school, or regiment, and it may be asked whether ‘pride’ in this sense is a sin. I think it depends on what, exactly, we mean by ‘proud of’. Very often, in such sentences, the phrase ‘is proud of’ means ‘has a warm-hearted admiration for.”
I think we understand the distinction. If you are proud of your child for winning first place because you are happy for him and all the work he has put in, that is fine. But if you sit there smugly looking down at all the other children who deep down you believe are dim-witted nincompoops then you have a problem.
This is the difference between constantly berating your children for not living up to your expectations because you are worried about the impact on your reputation and feeling disappointed in a result because Oscar failed to reach his potential. The former is the sin of pride, the latter is just being a parent.
CS Lewis calls the sin of pride “spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” And we can see this lack of common sense in the high – street and our banks in the month of June.
It doesn’t make sense to adorn your public spaces and work places with rainbow flags because of someone’s sexuality. It is just ridiculous. It does not make sense to take over the public streets and march uphill and down dale wearing not very much at all because you are proud of something you cannot change. This entire Pride fandango is an error coming and going. Stop it. Get yourself a new name and confine yourselves to a day of celebration.
Most of us only get a day to celebrate ourselves. The Good Lord himself only gets one day to celebrate his birth. Yet the pride people demand an entire month. That’s just greedy. A little humility – the virtue that stands opposite to the sin of pride – is in order. Or indeed moderation. And Pride marches are not known for their moderation.
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