E
lena and I went to a local game store to play some Blackletter after Mass today. There was a great big hullaballoo downtown -- a mixture of a Pride parade with a lot of pro-Palestine demonstrators as well. Those two flags have always been an odd match -- I very much doubt the vast majority of Palestinians are super down with the LGBTQ++ crowd.
The absolute hegemony of the rainbow flag, and its odd cousin, the Trans Rights flag, in liberal American society is worthy of its own religious studies subcategory. Gay marriage is federally legalized, queer representation is monumental across narrative media, each generation is more progressive than the last; and yet there is this deep, powerful need to express on massive and garish scale the support for progressive causes that have not seen anything more than geriatric gasps of resistance for more than twenty years. There is truly a religious dimension to the whole things -- there is liturgy, holy texts, prophets, rituals, processions, mantras, martyrs, everything you could ask for.
What does it mean when people are fervently painting their faces with rainbows in one of the most liberal towns in the nations in the year of our Lord 2,024? This movement does not want to win, cannot accept the possibility of winning, because being the victors would mean the pageantry is over. The goal has moved on from just existing and "loving who you want" -- if that's what it ever was. It must keep moving forward, keep pushing boundaries, keep finding bigoted family members that it can pretend are the omnipotent gatekeepers to happiness, if they could only be swept away. It's not for nothing that the movement has labeled itself with the word PRIDE. Pride will never stop -- it cannot, once it has taken root on its own terms.