by Lorenzo Bernasconi

The "pride" month

It is nothing new that, between June and July, the center of major Italian cities are invaded by the diverse and colorful procession of what was once known as "Gay Pride" but, in recent years, is advertised outright as "Pride".

New, if anything, is the media relevance of these parades, which, at times, manage to overshadow even the conflict in Ukraine and the now "classic" (and for that very reason perhaps somewhat worn-out) covid emergency. Then again, for the past 15 years, media attention - and, by extension, public attention - to the LGBT community's demands has grown almost exponentially; this, of course, has also forced Italian politics to come to terms with a phenomenon previously considered marginal.

Politics and the LGBT movements

The Center-Left, devoid of consensus among the lower classes (also and especially because of that political area's parties' shift toward ultraliberal positions in the economic sphere and elitist positions in the social sphere) has mostly espoused and encouraged any initiative born within the various LGBT movements, in an ill-concealed attempt to replenish its own electorate as well as to bury, in the clamor of the battle for civil rights, the embarrassing scrapping of social rights endorsed by the Left first with the Fornero reform and then with the de facto repeal of Article 18 of the workers' statute enacted by the Renzi government.

On the right, by contrast, with the exception of some fringe Catholic elements and individual members with particularly traditionalist ideas, very few have grasped what was happening in the LGBT world. However, the phenomenon has now reached such a dimension in Italy as well that it can no longer be overlooked, to the point that several center-right politicians are clumsily attempting to jump (sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally) on the Pride bandwagon in order to evade the strides of the mainstream media, which is largely aligned in favor of the LGBT movement, and perhaps secretly hoping to grab a few more votes.

Target intolerance

However, it seems that many do not understand what the real goal of the LGBT movement as it has been shaped in recent years is, although neither opinion leaders in the area, nor pro-gender nonfiction, nor gay associations make any effort to conceal it.

That goal is no longer represented, as it might have been in the 1970s, by the promotion of tolerance and the ability to accept the other, the different. The deep core of these virtues, of which fanatics of all kinds are devoid (and it is precisely this lack that makes them dangerous) can be summed up in that prospective gaze and ability to question themselves that generally keeps reasonable people from exclaiming "fiat veritas (mea), et pereat mundus."

Tolerance is an act of reconciliation with reality; it is the realization that the world is larger and more complex than the patterns and rationale according to which human thought is structured; it means, after all, accepting that the world pre-exists us not only on a chronological level, but also on an ontological level, and that therefore we are not its masters.

None of this, however, seems to have anything to do with the Pride and related movements anymore, whose leitmotif, though mostly flaunted under the label of "equality," is now that of "normalization."

Keywords: normalize

Already the word's root, with its splendid polysemanticity, reminds us how much a one-dimensional thinking reduced to slogans ("love is love" and other amenities) is unable to grasp the size and effects of that iceberg whose multicolored tip emerges in these weeks in so many streets of Italy. If, in fact, any behavior that is statistically widespread enough in a given population is part of the normal, a norm is a law that anyone in a given society must abide by, subject to sanctions (including criminal sanctions) should they choose to transgress it.

Making normal what until yesterday was not normal requires a slow and not entirely governable cultural shift, while making normative an area where the need for legislative intervention had not previously been felt is a much quicker process and virtually within the reach of anyone with sufficient economic resources to sustain adequate lobbying.

To norm for normalizing

On this same blog you will find numerous articles analyzing how the LGBT movement has been lobbying the lawmakers for years to criminalize the expression of divergent views; likewise, you will read about attempts to impose forms of "gender education" on the youngest children and the continuing call for special, increasingly broad and radical legislation aimed at guaranteeing by law to the LGBT community forms of protection and support unavailable to any other category of citizens.

It is clear from all this that the path chosen by LGBT organizations is that of normalization by legislation, that is, the attempt to predetermine by law how members of their community are perceived by the rest of society and how they relate to it. Although formally in line with the dynamics of a democratic system, such an operation is structured around a totalitarian ideological core that poses a danger to the system itself.

The motive of revenge

Like other minorities who assume that society owes them a debt (often on the back of injustices suffered by the category several centuries ago), the LGBT movement seems to conceive of achieving ex lege "equality" as a form of restorative justice that would go some way toward making up for the discrimination (real or alleged) suffered by homosexuals in the past.

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Now, it is difficult for me to understand in what capacity today's gay activists can feel entitled to claim redress in reparation for wrongs suffered in other eras by people with whom they have no personal or blood ties (homosexuality, of course, is NOT hereditary!). What matters, however, is that if the reform drive promoted by the LGBT community stems from a desire for revenge against a society perceived as hostile, such a drive, should it achieve its goals, will in practical terms do nothing more than legalize a perverse form of collective revenge.

The totalitarian root of the LGBT movement feeds precisely on this desire to "make it pay" to a society from which it has been kept on the sidelines in the past. It seems clear that its goal is to achieve a covert form of minority dictatorship in which, on certain issues, the only permissible choices and opinions are those agreeable to the gay community, and in which anyone who dares to express divergent ideas is not only punished and silenced by the power of the state, but also ousted from civil society, since those who do not hasten to distance themselves from the "offender" risk finding themselves subjected to the same treatment.

The equality of accountants

Fiat aequalitas et pereat mundus, this is the cardinal principle of the society that pleases the LGBT lobby and its flankers. An equality from accountants, rigid and abstract, completely disconnected from reality and imposed from above in total disregard for the concrete consequences of its application. Never mind that we end up with two-meter by 100kg athletes who "feel like a woman" and compete against female athletes who weigh half as much as they do; never mind that genetics, which does not bend to our wishes, dictates that children be born to a man and a woman and that "alternative" couples, in order to realize their supposed "right" to parenthood, have to go and exploit the bodies of some desperate woman in poorer countries.

Like any other form of totalitarian thinking, LGBT ideology, when its patterns come up against reality, does not agree to redraw them: on the contrary, it tries to impose them by any means, even against evidence and reason. An attitude quite opposite to that of those inspired by the value of tolerance.

It is, after all, nothing more than another manifestation of that hybris that generated the 20th century's totalitarianisms; it is man's claim to be able to remake himself and the cosmos, the rejection of that human condition that Heidegger called "Geworfenheit," the finding oneself thrown into a natural and human world that pre-exists us, with which we are related from the first moment and of which we are yes custodians, but not masters.

A class of privileged people

This is not a matter of guaranteeing the physical safety of homosexual people, nor their right to compete on an equal footing with everyone else in the workplace or their ability to live a married life with whomever they please: all of this, in the West, has been guaranteed to them for many years now, and no one (except Islamic extremism, but that is another matter) would dream of questioning it.

The crux of the matter here is whether we want to pander to an ideology that aims to create a class of privileged people to whom it will be impossible by law to address the slightest criticism and whose exponents will be able at any time to blackmail anyone who does not belong to the class of "chosen ones," instrumentally playing the card of homophobia and discrimination (and perhaps threatening denunciations and media pillory) in order to obtain jobs, promotions, privileged treatment and whatever else by bypassing more deserving people who are "guilty" of heterosexuality.

Stand up to intolerance

I am convinced that even among gays there are many libertarians opposed to this ideological drift of many associations that in theory should represent them: however, I fear that, for them even more than for us, it is really difficult to express countercultural positions on these issues, given the predictable and nefarious consequences on the social level. Nevertheless, I think it is essential that anyone who cherishes values such as freedom and tolerance (regardless of his or her sexual tastes) should not give an inch to the pressures of today's LGBT activism, which is, it should be remembered, quite different in methods and aims from that of the last century.

While it is true that resisting such pressures increasingly means finding oneself paying a high price politically and personally, it is also true that, in the past, many men and women have found the courage to stand up to far stronger and more violent regimes and movements, often risking their own lives.

It is time to counter LGBT intolerance with genuine cultural and civic resistance in the name of freedom of expression and conscience, without fear and without trying to please those who would have us subjugated and silent.

Anything else is collaborationism.

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Research Fellow at the Machiavelli Center for Political and Strategic Studies, formerly worked as a consultant at European Parliament, Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Chamber of Deputies and Ministry of Economic Development. M.A. in Philosophy at the Catholic University of Milan.