‘Pride Month’ nothing to be proud of

OPINION:

What does it mean to be human? Is the individual person made in the image of God or the image of the animal?

The question of human identity is perhaps the most important question of our time. Everything we talk about and argue over — whether it be politics, morality, justice or human rights — rests on how we respond to this one basic question: Who are we and what does it mean to be human?

The answer from progressives is clear. Their solution is to dumb down the definition of the human being to little more than what we are inclined to do. For the proponents of “Pride Month,” passions and proclivities define the person. Inclinations equal the individual. If you want to do it, then that is just who you are.

Reason and rationality take a back seat to emotions. There is no such thing as an objective definition of a man or woman or boy or girl. With apologies to Shania Twain, if a dude “feels like a woman,” then that is what he is. Desire defines everything.

Conservatives, on the other hand, believe human beings are more than this. Our appetites and desires do not determine who we are. We can and should rise above our instincts, our gut and our libido. We can and should choose to act differently. We can and should control ourselves and behave morally.

Conservatives know there are many things we may want to do that we simply should not do. Unlike the animals around us, we refuse to define ourselves by our desires.

For approximately 4,000 years, the Judeo-Christian tradition has affirmed all this. For several millennia, we have understood that people yearn for justice while our dogs, horses and cows do not. Throughout the annals of time, conservatives have known that issues such as tolerance, love, inclusion, equality and fairness are uniquely human.

We have acknowledged the obvious difference between good and evil: for example, that rape is wrong, slavery should be reviled and that greed is bad. For at least four centuries, conservatives have understood that while pigs and goats may not care about such things, people do, and although animals may be defined by their instincts and inclinations, human beings are not.

Defining what it means to be human is the necessary predicate for everything that follows. It is the starting point for all subsequent arguments for how we define government, build culture, manage our schools, establish our laws and raise our families. If we fail at this first thing — the definition of what it means to be human — then everything else collapses.

Gore Vidal once said, “There is no more such thing as a homosexual person than there is a heterosexual person. These are behavioral adjectives.” Michel Foucault added, “We are creating a false species; an hermaphrodism.”

Neither of these men was a conservative Christian. Both were secular atheists. Yet even they understood the difference between a noun and an adjective, between a man and a beast.

The former LGBTQ activist and now Christian apologist Rosaria Butterfield says this: “We are struggling in a world that has falsely declared sexual orientation to be a true moniker of personhood. … Those who have same-sex desires are really not a separate category of [people]. … The category of sexual orientation was really invented in the 19th century. It’s not a biblical category. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are verbs, what people do. These are not nouns. These are not what people are or who people are. They’re adjectives, or they’re verbs.”

Glenn T. Stanton, author of “Marriage on Trial,” adds: “To identify people principally by their sexuality is to reduce people. … We should all reject this with great force. A person’s inherent and or undeniable value is rooted in his membership in humanity, not his particularity, sexual or otherwise, full stop. Your inherent value is not your sexuality, and it’s not your race. It’s not your gender. It’s not the color of your skin. It’s not whether you’re White, Black, Asian, or Native. It doesn’t matter. Your undeniable value is rooted in your membership in humanity. … There is only one race. It’s the human race.”

There is a world of difference between the progressive and conservative definitions of human. One worldview elevates human beings to the image of God himself. The other degrades people by suggesting that they, like their dogs, cannot control themselves.

The latter, my friends, is surely nothing to be proud of.

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at [email protected].