Who is Hurt When a Culture Celebrates LGBTQ+ Identities?

I’ve spent the last few days walking the streets and alleyways of one of my favorite small rural villages in the Northwest. The coffee, the flowers, the food, the views, everything is made so beautiful by the hearts and hands of these local artists.

Perhaps the only thing more ubiquitous than the thoughtful touches of creativity is the LBTQ+ pride flags and signs proclaiming things like “everyone is loved here” and “this is a safe place”.

Really?

Is everyone loved?

Is everyone made more safe?

You see amidst all of this beauty I find these messages strangely dissonant. Why, because these signs aren’t loving everyone and are choosing to make some safe and others less safe but the other side of these well-meaning messages is hidden. So let’s take a minute to spotlight those being excluded and often injured by the ideology these messages are promoting. Pointing this out is so important because the reason for the boldness with which shop owners and churches fly these flags betrays the fact they either don’t know or don’t care about the cruelty their “kindness” perpetrates on other parties.

So here are five parties you choose to injure by flying your pride flags.

Children

“Celebrating LGBTQ+ pride is the practice of acting compassionate to some children while being cruel to others.”

Children are hurt more than any other party by a culture that champions individual identities over family identities. Flying these flags is a signal that the movement that says your sexuality is the place from which you form your deepest identity is deeply anti-family. The United States has now surpassed Sweden as the country with more single-parent households than any country in the world. The other thing that the US and Sweden have in common (along with all the other top countries where family bonds dissolve most frequently) is these places are where hyper-individualism is being most aggressively embraced.

Children growing up without both a mother and father are at an enormous disadvantage but even researchers who have most documented this fact refuse to draw the obvious connection between hyperindividualism and refusal to create a culture that encourages children to find their identity in their family over their sexuality. A culture championing hedonistic sexuality and the primacy of sexual identity may seem momentarily safer for someone wishing to explore alternative sexual identities but it is decidedly neither safer nor more loving for countless millions of children affected by the weakening of the family that’s the inevitable result.

Your Ancestors

“Every person you meet is part of a family line so resilient, so resourceful, so powerful it stretches back unbroken to the very beginning of the human race.”

Did thousands of your ancestors persevere through countless unremembered sacrifices in order for their descendants, at a time when we enjoy more peace and safety than they could have ever dreamed, choose to end our family lines forever?

This alone is reason not to be proud of LGBTQ+ identities. Challenges like same-sex attraction make the tragedy of ending a resilient family line more likely but this is not something to celebrate. Stop disrespecting the gift of life given to you by your ancestors and celebrate continuing your family line not ending it.

Your Descendants

“Much of our suffering is caused by our short-sighted forefathers and we return the favor by ignoring how our decisions impact our descendants. Break this cycle in your generation.”

I once read that when a Jewish child dies before having children the family mourns not only the loss of that child but the 10,000 descendants of that child who will now never be born. This of course is true at the death of any child. But today, instead of mourning the loss of descendants, we celebrate identities that make cutting off a person’s future descendants some kind of accomplishment.

The Covenant of Marriage

“It’s just a piece of paper…” No, a wedding is an act of covenant-making before God. This is a brilliant idea that gives stability to entire civilizations. We diminish its significance at our own peril.

The reason for the narrow sexual ethic in Scripture is to create a culture that promotes multigenerational families. One man and one woman for life is the only sexual ethic worth celebrating. The reason we throw a party when a couple has stayed faithfully married for 50 years is that something remarkable has been genuinely accomplished, not just for that couple or for that couple’s family, but for society as a whole. Now that’s a flag worth flying.

Instead today we celebrate the bravery of someone publicly championing their desires at the expense of others. Our culture refuses to face the fact that every time we loosen the Biblical sexual ethic we weaken the marriage covenant at the core of the family for future generations and our grandchildren will pay the price. The marriage covenant has never been weaker starting with no-fault divorce and climaxing with the redefinition of marriage to include alternative arrangements. We don’t see the cultural cruelty being unleashed by our supposed compassion because it launches a slow-moving disease that will be most fully experienced by those not yet born.

God

“As followers of Jesus, our allegiance is to the King, and His kingdom is our priority. Submitting to Christ as King is an act of worship.” -Bailey Gillespie

Last but not least any follower of Jesus believes that this world was designed for a purpose by an all-knowing all-loving God.

These flags have become a growing symbol of conquest. They represent an alternate kingdom. They say, “We have dethroned Jesus and now worship the idol of self.”

God never makes someone LGBTQ+, this is a false identity category created by a culture determined to free itself from the purpose behind its design. Yes, some struggle more than others to live into the design of the Creator but we don’t celebrate the decision to give into the wrong side of that struggle. We should have genuine compassion for these challenges without encouraging a lifestyle of sin along with all of the inevitable consequences that result.

So the next time you see a business or church proclaiming their compassion, understand the real trade-off of cruelty they are celebrating as well. We become what we celebrate and today it takes wisdom and courage to stand up to the collective blindness to injuries and corruption being unleashed by this ideology.