by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

This is the version that appeared in The American Spectator. A later version, with more Jewish and Israeli examples that may be of interest to many readers, appeared in the Israel National News.

Pride Month,” huh? Proud of what?

Honestly, what is the actual message when someone parades that he-she-they is “proud” to be LGBTQIA+? If we penetrate the static, he simply is declaring that he wants the world to know his coitus preferences. That’s it. He is not declaring his religion, ethnicity, or political views. He simply is declaring, “I consort physically with …”

Aside from all other concerns, isn’t that, uh, terribly private? It is shameful to prattle on about even normal heterosexuality to others. TMI.

In a normal society, people sensibly would be repulsed: “That is something to parade? My father and mother — and all other billions of fathers and mothers — do not promenade, bellowing whom they prefer in the bedroom. Who parades to tell the world he lusts for redheads? Or for certain body shapes and dimensions? Who does this? Keep your private business to yourself — we don’t want to know.”

That simple commonsense reaction would be true even if LGBTQIA+ behavior were not outside of nature. It is no one’s business. Do people with irritable bowel syndrome parade behind a brown flag to proclaim pride in their common situation? Or people who need to wake up several times nightly to micturate? How did this perverted and corrupted culture ever come to this?

And what could be more perverted than for a baseball team to give a stage to “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” a group that devotes itself to tearing down Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular? They began in San Francisco as homosexual men dressing as nuns. They choose names based on the process of renaming women inducted into Catholic orders, but that are sexually offensive: Sister Anita Blowjob, Sister GladAss of the Joyous Reserectum, and such. The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club is a professional athletic organization that has offered apolitical entertainment primarily to the residents of Southern California, and also to Dodgers fans throughout America. Baseball is an inter-generational family pastime, and the sport historically has been associated with wholesome family values. There is no place in baseball for the interjection of political partisanship or woke counter-cultural advocacy that offends mainstream religious family sensitivities. Drag queens who dress like nuns and mock the sacred sacraments of the Catholic Church have ample other platforms to promote their depraved activities and deeply offensive images. (READ MORE: Don’t Just Blame the Dodgers: Blame the Collapse of Catholic Fidelity)

Truth can coexist with courtesy. We can empathize with and care for those with gender dysphoria, mental illness, unnatural attractions, and other orientations outside society’s norm. Doors should be open to those who approach with respect.

The ongoing years-long failures of even traditional conservative churches and synagogues, congregational organizations, and institutions to address LGBTQIA+ tyranny has emboldened outliers to assert and even demand a brazen “right” to have their LGBTQIA+ status and their transgender extremes honored and even hallowed. Incomprehensibly, they expect Bud Light consumers to go along, meekly, like sheep. Target shoppers. Disney vacationers. Frankly, all of America. They expect us to patronize their movies and television shows, all embedding woke messages. They expect us to give them the grand stage of a baseball stadium to spit on religion, mocking it in a way that society never would allow if aimed by mainstream citizens at outlier targets.

They expect their devoutly religious parents, siblings, and other relatives to attend their “gay nuptials.” They expect churches and synagogues to celebrate their public desecrations by announcing their “weddings” and even hosting their collations. Like children who threaten to hold their breath “until they turn blue,” they insert into their every polemic that, if they are not given everything they demand, it will be on the heads of everyone else that they will commit suicide.

Suicide is almost always an act of mental illness. A population subgroup that regularly speaks of their high suicide rate should think about what they are saying about themselves. Discrimination does not breed suicide; otherwise, Jews would have registered two millennia of world-leading suicide rates. Mental illness, gender dysphoria, unnatural desires, and related matters must be approached with sensitivity and loving-kindness. But they must be recognized for what they are. Throughout nature, the male–female union is normal.

Woke tyranny coerces silent acquiescence and lip service, where people regularly speak against conscience. To hold their jobs, normal people grimly hold their tongues. They don’t want to be socially ostracized. Therefore, we do not hear people speaking commonsense truths about what is natural and what is unnatural. Even a Supreme Court justice nominee, on the brink of receiving a high-paying lifetime job at a hearing where she has the votes, was terrified to define a woman. Even though the only reason she was named to the post was that she — like Joe Biden’s U.N. ambassador, his sub-mediocre press spokesperson, and his below-sub-mediocre vice president — is a woman. We are not allowed to say it. That leaves a monopoly for an outlier minority to dominate the discourse and demand acquiescence to its lifestyle that deviates from the norm.

Ironically, I probably have pastorally counseled and stood by more LGBTQIA+ men and women than have 99 percent of my readers and colleagues in the clergy. Most of whom I have counseled have approached me in venues varying from law schools where I taught to actual law-firm practice, where law associates approached me confidentially. Many in disquietude just naturally assume that a rabbi would be more caring than a regular law professor or big-firm litigator. They are correct. Then word of mouth spreads from those I helpfully have counseled, giving rise to more individuals privately seeking my guidance and caring.

Yet, when I read mushy, touchy-feely, woke-inspired apologetics by even conservative religious leaders and associations about how much “more” needs to be done for the LGBTQIA+ community, I ask:

…What about religious teens, who, all data show as do empirical results in America, will abandon religion and faith as their secular colleges ruin them?

…And what about women (long-term singles, divorced, widowed) over age 40 or 45 who desperately want to marry but cannot find a husband — so (i) live desperate lonely lives and (ii) sometimes ultimately will give up on core personal values and standards because the loneliness is unbearable?

… And what about people going through a divorce, whether spouses rifting or their children experiencing their homes breaking and their innocence shattered?

… And what about people diagnosed with terminal diseases like cancer, needing incredible amounts of encouragement and reassurance just to go on? To do their chemo, overcome the psychological impact of their hair falling out, sitting for hours during infusions, living with bouts of nausea, doubting the time they have left? And what of their families and loved ones?

… And what about people who have lost their jobs or incomes or never really have had enough income, and maybe never will, and face losing their homes or marriages for financial reasons?

… And what about people with all kinds of other needs — physical, spiritual, emotional — who deserve at least as much of our time and focus as do the LGBTQIA+ population?

What about them — they who compose such a larger part of our society but do not enjoy the glamor of woke advocacy and TV and movie entertainers and TikTok influencers endlessly parroting their “cause”?

We must not allow others to intimidate us to adopt alien values and priorities. In a world where lies are defended by the woke as “My Truth,” we must bear witness to Our Truth.

Those who are LGBTQIA+ should receive compassion, not public audience accolades at Dodgers Stadium. They should be seeking pastoral counsel privately rather than promenading in boisterous “pride parades.” Pride? In having unnatural desires?

In polite society, homosexuality always was personal and private — and so was and is “straight” heterosexuality.

The advocates and virtue signalers parrot “woke” platitudes dominating today’s coarse secular Western culture. LGBTQIA+ is an acronym that means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Two-Spirit, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally, A-gender, Bi-gender, Pansexual, Pangender, and Gender Variant. Keep an open mind because this list continually evolves, and English has 19 letters left.

Those LGBTQIA+ people whom we may be able to help will seek and find us because we mean well and do nothing to alienate them. If they do not seek us, our plates always will be full of so many others whose needs are even more deserving of our focus and time. Parade that with Pride.

Originally published in The American Spectator