By Rich
Lowry
Tuesday,
June 13, 2023
It’s June,
when one can be forgiven for thinking we live in the United States of
LGBTQIA2S+.
Old
Glory is, at best, supplemented
with, and sometimes
supplanted by, the pride flag in all its varieties.
The
flag, which has become more and more unsightly, is ubiquitous. Its increasingly
elaborate jumble of clashing stripes — whether seen in a store, at a ball game,
or on U.S. government buildings — is a reminder to get with the program, and
that the program is always changing.
Team
Biden draped what is known as the Progress Pride flag, with no fewer than 11
different colors, on the White House in between two American flags, giving it —
no pun intended — pride of place.
Flags
aren’t trifling matters. People rally to them and live and die for them. The
firing on the flag at Fort Sumter at the outset of the Civil War, for instance,
had a galvanizing effect on the North. “On forts and ships, from church-spires
and flag-staffs, from colleges, hotels, storefronts and private balconies, from
public edifices, everywhere the old flag was flung out,” historian George
Preble writes in a passage that could almost as accurately describe the
unavoidable June displays of the pride flag.
Whereas
the power of the Star-Spangled Banner is its extraordinary history, its
relatively simple design, its easily understood symbolism, and its call to
unify all Americans — not to mention the sacrifices made to defend it — the
pride flag is the opposite.
It’s
always being refashioned (the version displayed on the White House dates all
the way back to 2018), it’s an aesthetic disaster, it’s inscrutable, and it’s a
banner concerned with the recognition of splinter groups.
If you
wanted to create a visual representation of “intersectionality,” the latest
iterations of the flag would be it.
The old,
quaint rainbow flag had the virtue of being simpler than its subsequent
renditions and of representing broad categories of things (life, sunlight,
etc.), rather than specific groups of people. The flag started as eight stripes
and got dropped to six for pragmatic reasons before additional stripes started
getting layered in.
As it
happens, there are dozens of separate flags out there for every gender identity and
sexual orientation — pansexual, non-binary, gender fluid, asexual, you name it.
How could they be left out?
First,
the City of Philadelphia added black and brown stripes to the top of the flag
in 2017 to recognize people of color. The next year, a designer took the black
and brown stripes — along with light blue, pink, and white stripes incorporated
from the transgender flag — and put them in a horizontal chevron to make the
Progress Pride flag.
Yet
another update added a yellow triangle with a purple circle from the intersex
flag.
The
resulting banner has all the visual appeal of a TV test pattern. It’s hard to
see any principle by which other groups should be excluded. By the time it’s
all said and done, the thing could look like a Sherwin-Williams fan deck, if it
doesn’t already.
Like the
LBGTQ+ cause generally, the flag has become increasingly esoteric and obsessed
with identity politics — there’s always another letter or another stripe. But
what better representation of a movement that has gone down the rabbit holes of
such bizarre causes as insisting that males compete in women’s sports and
minors get life-altering “gender-affirming care” that other advanced countries
are turning away from as a terrible mistake?
Yet, it
flies everywhere as though it were a quasi-national flag with universal popular
assent. Even U.S. government buildings here at home and U.S. embassies abroad
are bedecked with the flag. If Republicans ever get unified control of
government, they should ban this practice. The government shouldn’t be
promoting boutique causes, and we already have a flag that includes everyone,
that doesn’t require constant ideological makeover, and that isn’t an eyesore.
The
Stars and Stripes should be sufficient for this and every month.
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