The Difference Between 2SLGBTQIA+ Pride and the Sin of Pride
Every June, a certain person I know will ask where I am off to as I dance away in rainbow colors with fistfuls of transgender and Phillie Pride flags. I will singsong, “Off to Queer Pride celebration in X place!” And they will solemnly admonish me, “Pride goeth before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirite before a fall.”) I am tempted to giggle about the introduction of a Biblical translation named after one of the queerest kings in history.
The sin (missing the mark) of superbia (usually translated as pride) is not the same thing as the celebration called Pride.
Superbia, which means something more like boastfulness, arrogance, and conceit that disregards or diminishes others are social failures. They are busy lifting up one person as somehow better than other people.
The “pride” of 2SLGBTQIA+ Pride Month is much more like Psalm 47’s lifting up of the pride of Israel. Rather than expressing superbia, these are collective events of naming and claiming ourselves as free and loving people in the vast diversity of how we are, who we love, how we worship, and yes, because there are people doing fashion commentary, what we wear.
Pride Month is about countering the social sin of superbia that seeks to dismiss, demonize, and authorize harm to Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual people.
Superbia indeed authorizes destruction regularly, passing laws that prevent people from using public bathrooms in accordance with who they are, eliminating safe places in schools for all children and teens to learn there are so many ways to be kind, generous and loving people, and intervening between people and their medical practitioners from practicing good medicine.
For many people who grew up with the King James version of the Bible, the Sacred sounds like it hangs out in the English of the early 1600s (CE) even though it is a translation of Hebrew and Greek texts that are much, much older. Those of us who have regularly faced condemnation using this particular translation combined with superbia, know when the -eths come out, someone’s claiming holy mantles for their own (not God’s) business (because when were they appointed spokesperson rather than regular neighbor like the rest of us). The insistence on the -eth after “go” becomes a form of superbia, an attempt to claim to be expressing wisdom while condemning someone in order to put forward the condemner’s person as better.
2SLBGTQIA+ Pride events are not about the missing of the mark in how to be a kind, just and generous person by elevating some persons over others through conceitedness and boastfulness. They are, instead, about creating communities of play and healing, communities of resisting oppression and nurturing the kinship we have so often been denied by hateful legislation and people insisting on their more exclusionary understanding of religious life is protected and protectable by law, rather than standards that make room for the vast diversity of ways to worship (or not), to form neighbors and family and friends, to be kind and generous and be part of celebrating this life.
Go, celebrate. Come on down, celebrate. Unite to celebrate 2SLGBTQIA+ Pride month. We’re still having to work on legislative protections and educating people about queerness, about gender, about how love and life manifests in many wonderful ways. Still, we need to party. The joy of being our whole selves, after all, is what is so terrific, and disruptive to oppressive systems, and part of giving thanks for being here. Joy and celebration are spiritual practices, and these events are one way we’re in the spirit.