Denver Newsroom, Jun 1, 2022 / 18:00 pm (CNA).
The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See has again flown a Pride Flag, as President Joe Biden reiterated his commitment to supporting LGBT advocacy and, apparently, transgender-affirming health care for children.
“The United States respects and promotes the equality and human dignity of all people including the LGBTQIA+ community,” the U.S. embassy to the Vatican said on Twitter June 1. It showed a photo of its Pride Flag and used several hashtags including “All Inclusive.”
Today is the start of #Pride Month. The United States respects and promotes the equality and human dignity of all people including the LGBTQIA+ community. #PrideMonth #AllInclusive #Pride2022 pic.twitter.com/6VgN9R8c3J
— U.S. in Holy See (@USinHolySee) June 1, 2022
The acronym LGBTQIA+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, intersex. The “a” stands for “asexual,” an identity inconsistently used in other U.S. government statements, while the plus sign stands for other varieties of self-professed sexual identity.
The message differs slightly from last year’s, when the embassy said the U.S. “respects the dignity and equality of LGBTQI+ people.”
The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See showed the Pride Flag last year as well.
In early 2021 U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that U.S. embassies and consulates around the world could fly the Pride Flag on the same flagpole as the American flag, during “Pride season.”
That authorization to fly the flag, which was not a mandate, was given ahead of May 17, observed by activists as the international day against homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia.
Blinken’s cable on Pride Flags, first reported by Foreign Policy magazine in April 2021, advised that diplomatic posts in certain countries should avoid flying the rainbow flag if doing so would create a backlash.
The U.S. Embassy to Italy similarly displayed a Pride Flag and various messages on its Twitter page, including a link to President Joe Biden’s May 31 declaration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month.
“Today, the rights of LGBTQI+ Americans are under relentless attack,” Biden said, adding, “An onslaught of dangerous anti-LGBTQI+ legislation has been introduced and passed in States across the country, targeting transgender children and their parents and interfering with their access to health care.”
Biden did not specify the legislation, but some states have raised concerns that children are wrongly being exposed to sexual propaganda or wrongly face pressure to undergo purported gender transitions, beginning with puberty blockers.
The president said 45% of self-identified LGBTQI+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide last year, saying this is “a devastating reality that our Nation must work urgently to address.”
“Today and every day, my Administration stands with every LGBTQI+ American in the ongoing struggle against intolerance, discrimination, and injustice,” he said, rejecting violence against self-identified LGBTQI+ people.
“We reaffirm our belief that LGBTQI+ rights are human rights,” Biden’s message said.
Biden again called on Congress to pass the Equality Act, legislation which would establish sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in federal civil rights law alongside race and sex. The legislation would also override the limited religious freedom protections of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has warned that despite the bill’s stated aims of combatting discrimination, it would discriminate against people of faith who are opposed to the redefinition of marriage and to transgenderism.
The USCCB has warned that the bill, by mandating access to public accommodations based on one’s sexual orientation or gender identity, could be used to pressure churches to “host functions that violate their beliefs.” Religious adoption agencies could be forced to match children with same-sex couples, and faith-based women’s shelters could be required to house biological males identifying as transgender females.
U.S. government promotion of Pride Month has differed depending on the president.
Under the Trump administration, U.S. diplomatic outposts were reportedly prohibited from flying the rainbow Pride Flag from embassy flagpoles, and had to obtain special permission to do so. They were allowed to display the flag inside buildings.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See made pro-LGBT social media posts on the international day against homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia and during “Pride Month” in 2014 and in 2011.
The embassy also made a pro-LGBT Facebook post for “Pride Month” in 2017 during the Trump administration.
The U.S. State Department is funding LGBT advocacy throughout the world through its Global Equality Fund. Its multiple country partners include Italy. Non-government partners to the fund include the Human Rights Campaign and the Arcus Foundation, funded by billionaire heir Jon Stryker.
Stryker’s foundation has backed Christian LGBT groups and others which reject Christian teaching on marriage and sexual morality and seek to create cultural and doctrinal change within various denominations. Its grantees include Methodist groups which recently helped split the United Methodist Church over issues including sexuality.
Another U.S. State Department effort is the Global LGBTQI+ Inclusive Democracy and Empowerment Fund. The GLIDE Fund accepts funding requests for various projects, including those which seek to increase religious leaders’ support for self-identified LGBTQI+ people.
The promotion of LGBT causes can conflict with Christianity and other religions. In October 2015 Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle said Great Britain had sought to link financial aid to Ghana’s legal recognition of same-sex unions as marriages.
The Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, controversial for his support of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, has sought to connect pushback against LGBT advocacy to Russia’s war on Ukraine. He depicted Pride parades as a loyalty test to Western governments and to “the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power.”
In February 2022, Gallup reported that 7.1% of Americans now identify as LGBT. Of these, 57% identified as bisexual. Some 6% of all women respondents told Gallup they were bisexual, compared to 2% of men. The percentage of self-identified LGBT respondents was particularly high among younger generations. Surveying of self-identified LGBT respondents has caused debate over accuracy, given the possibility of respondent errors and sampling size problems. There is also debate over whether sexual self-identification in young people will persist as they age.
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Strange, I haven’t heard anything about them flying their stupid flag here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia…
We read: “The acronym LGBTQIA+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, intersex. The ‘a’ stands for ‘asexual,’ an identity inconsistently used in other U.S. government statements, while the plus sign stands for other varieties of self-professed sexual identity.”
In the cause of inclusiveness, we can be thankful that there are only 26 letters in the English language! Although if we ass-ume a more Chinese future, we then will have 50,000 total characters to poke around with.
Of the Chinese menu, 50,000 characters, one begins to wonder how James Martin can be so exclusive. You know, so BINARY!…
Why distinguish between humans and animals? Maybe the “a” in LGBTQIA+ can stand (so to speak) for ANIMALISM? Likewise, the “+” sign. So, hey, Martin-guy, there are 6,400 mammal species in the animal kingdom. And 10,000 reptiles. And 8,000 amphibians (mostly frogs). And 9,700 bird species. This adds up to 32,100!
And, speaking of gender theory fluidity, we might as well add the fish at another 34,000. This gives us 68,100 within the spectrum of a truly NON-EXCLUSIVE rainbow flag. (Crickets and insects, another 900,000 species!)
But, wait, what? Can’t do that! Can’t add the Animal Kingdom. A non-progressive reference to “kings,” and therefore “queens”! Inclusive, but now too binary! What would one say to drag queens who still demand face time in kindergarten reading groups?
With his binary division between the Animal Kingdom versus Human Beings, Mr/Mrs/Ms/Mother/Father (78 gender theory pronouns!) Disneyworld/Jiminy-Cricket Martin has much to answer for—given his recent erection to consultor for the Vatican Secretariat on Communications.
Or rather sad shame!
In my book,June is the month devoted to the Sacred Heart
Your book must have missed the ‘ban’ on pre-VCII missals and liturgical calendars. Best not mention it lest our Modern Thought Prohibitors begin to fret. Just now I visioned Cupich calling Roche.
Meanwhile gas prices are going up around 10 cents a week, etc., not to mention everytotherdamnthing.
But – priorities are priorities.
Is there anyone out there who is surprised by this? I wonder what the pope thinks of this.
If, as it seems with cardinal appointments Hollerich Synod of Synodality relator that the Church [at first it seemed the Vatican had become a field hospital for morally challenged clerics] is undergoing dastardly homosexualization [a new word already applied in comments] the US, might we say, is already homosexualmogonized [meaning completely integrated as in homogenization]. Except for the dwindling remaining who are not morally deranged.
Although the rapid spread of the homosexual phenomenon convinces some that this moral disease is natural, as Republican commentator Dennis Prager told David Rubin 2017 that, “The normal state of a person’s sexuality is bi-sexuality”. Most do say they’re born that way. If so, why the sudden claims multiplying exponentially? Is [mostly] everyone coming out of the closet? Christians and those with right reason would answer that if we abandon belief in an infinite good, the divinity who we identify with the Christian God, then the natural tendency is toward any and all sensual pleasure as a good in itself [as indicated by saint Paul in Romans 1] regardless of tradition, or even natural attraction toward the opposite sex. Prager, and the crew of the US embassy in Rome fall into that mindset, as does our president. We are indeed suffering a tsunami of perversion in our world a convincing indication of Satan’s grasp on Mankind. And the expectation of divine retribution.
As much as Pope Francis derides tradition, the truth is that he regards all traditions as equal; it’s just that some traditions are more equal than others.
Take, for example, the historic tradition of accommodating the self-destruction of civilization, as earlier in Greece and Rome:
“Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes. This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the Empire. . . .” (Christopher Dawson, “The Patriarchal Family in History,” The Dynamics of World History, 1962).
And, yet, the papal prayer intention for the month of June is for families.
Let us pray, therefore, for this intention in Pope Francis’s heart, as he steers the Barque of Peter in a time of Babel-ing turbulence and with a mutinous crew. And—among his stacked deck (deck, a fitting term!) of cardinal appointments—that there’s a two-thirds majority who know more than he about navigation and staying the course.
I wonder if the pope regrets not taking a hard line stand with Biden when he met him. Probably not. In which case he should not be shocked about such “in your face” action on the part of the US Vatican embassy. After all, who is he to judge? Lets just let everyone just do their own thing, right? Gay people for example have been around for centuries. I count some as friends, genuinely. But I draw the line at the indoctrination and physical mutilation of children. Minimally, the pope could have come out against that. The price of a pope who regards leadership as “being mean”: A church with no direction, in which innocents are certainly being sacrificed. Finally , that 45% of alphabet soup kids consider suicide is confirmation that this situation present mental health issues which should be treated, not pandered to.
Word has it that media personality Sebastian Gorka is marketing a line of rainbow-themed LGBTQ merchandise, with the abbreviation standing for “Let’s Get Biden To Quit.” So Biden, typically unwittingly, apparently supports his own resignation.