Another Pride Month has come and gone. I'll admit that it was more subdued than it has been in recent years. The specter of Israeli neo-Nazi homophobes throwing Gazan gays off rooftops undoubtedly dampened the festivities (more on that below). But I'm old enough to remember when Pride was just a parade in the big cities. Then it became a day. Then a week. Now it's a month. Now it's in schools, department stores, fast food chains, and library reading rooms. And if you think it's all going just a tad overboard, you're worse than Hitler.

If aliens observed Pride Month from space, one could forgive them for assuming that gays in contemporary America must be the most oppressed group in the history of mankind, hence the necessity of an ever-increasing display of awareness and recognition. But an unfortunate and entirely predictable, phenomenon has occurred in the years since Obergefell and the advent of gays in the military. The oppressed has become the oppressor and gleefully so. To recap the last decade or so of Pride:

Christian business owner Jack Phillips has been mired in lawfare since 2012 after he politely refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding due to his religious beliefs. Despite having won his case at the Supreme Court (on procedural grounds), he kept getting requests from LGBTQ activists to make obscene cakes, which they knew beforehand that he would refuse to bake, at which time they promptly sued and re-sued, intending to destroy him and his business — all because he has a different opinion than they do as to what constitutes a marriage.

Is this what you're proud of?

We are told the purpose of Pride is for gay people to be accepted for who they are. But in recent Pride parades, organizers have banned rainbow flags with Stars of David superimposed (though Palestinian flags are allowed). At other Pride parades, organizers have banned gay police officers from marching. And, bizarrely, organizers have removed lesbians from Pride parades for the audacity of being attracted exclusively to women who are... wait for it... biological women. So much for accepting people for who they are.

Is this what you're proud of?

Drag queens and drag shows are intentionally targeting children. Some of these drag queens have turned out to be registered sex offenders. But even if they weren't, nobody, neither gay nor straight, has made a convincing argument as to why drag queens or drag shows are appropriate for kindergarteners. Rather than make such an argument, drag shows simply use armed Antifa brownshirts to protect their exhibitions in child predation.

Is this what you're proud of?

Related: Fitness Instagrammer Declares That Pride Month Is 'Unnecessary'

Whatever intentions lay behind the original LGBTQ movement, it no longer belongs to consenting, homosexual adults wishing to keep the government out of their bedrooms. Every sexual and gender identity group that is the product of fevered imaginations has commandeered it. The goal isn't some abstract societal acceptance of sexuality but the precise and deliberate destruction of the nuclear family. To this end, these groups have exploited social media to convince untold thousands of confused, depressed teenagers to irreversibly mutilate themselves.

Is this what you're proud of?

You who were so brave in mocking the handful of octogenarians who used to show up to protest your parades now quiver at the youthful Lia Thomases and Dylan Mulvaneys who wield the power to cast you into social oblivion should you not loudly and publicly concur with their ever-arbitrary definitions of reality.

You who are so brave in donning priests' and nuns' gear to mock Christians would never dream of doing so to Muslims, whose compatriots are doing far worse to gays today than the meanest Christians ever did to gays, at any time in the history of their religion. Your "pride" seems inversely proportionate to the reasonable expectation of violence derived from its expression. The less the threat from your "enemy," the more "pride" you rub their faces in. Nuns don't shoot up gay nightclubs in Florida or hang you from cranes in Tehran, so it's safe to make fun of them. 

And you'll notice that Queers for Palestine does not have fellow travelers in Jihadists for Gays. Nor will it ever. This alliance of convenience ends one way and one way only.

Is this what you're proud of?

Women's sports face the challenge of mediocre male athletes who never would have blipped on anyone's radar but are now shattering women's records, stealing women's scholarships, and breaking women's bones. In the darker corners of all-gender safe spaces, they are raping teenage girls. This is all happening under the protection of the LGBTQ banner. 

Is this what you're proud of?

Wait, what's that you say? You never intended for pedophiles, rapists, misogynists, and little punk totalitarians to hijack the gay rights movement? Guess what? They did exactly that. 

You can argue (and I would agree with you) that these ne'er-do-wells have piggybacked you with their own selfish and perverse agendas. But your movement's leadership (with noble exceptions) has fully embraced them out of fear of social cancellation or a sincere and dogmatically fanatical delusion that the traditional nuclear family, free market capitalism, and Western civilization are existential threats that must be annihilated at all costs and that this justifies defending the worst excesses of misogynists and sexual predators. To make an omelet...

Related: Woke Collision: Pride Marchers Vs. Pro-Terrorist Protesters

Why did they get away with it? Because you let them. Because you were so focused on shoving your pride in the faces of peripheral Christians and conservatives who only wanted to be left alone to, as you put it, "be themselves" and "celebrate who they are." And now the same intolerance you dished out is returning to you from ideologues who never actually cared about your marriages, your rights, or your equality, and simply used you — as they've used so many other identity groups — to consolidate their own power. Like Boxer in "Animal Farm," your usefulness for the cause is all but used up, and it's off to the glue factory for you.

Obergefell was your emancipation. You should have declared victory and gone home. But by then, your movement had become a racket too profitable to walk away from. Worse, it had become a vehicle through which its more spiteful adherents could exact vengeance from real or perceived enemies. This desire for vengeance derives naturally from the vice of pride.

When the slaves were freed, they didn't turn around and try to enslave their former owners. When women earned the right to vote, they didn't turn around and try to disenfranchise male voters. When our Founding Fathers won our freedom from King George III, they didn't turn around and try to conquer England. That's because their movements weren't built on pride. They were built on the recognition of a universal human dignity, which is the antithesis of pride.

Pride is a deceptive thing. Pride is not born of self-assured confidence, but of doubt, envy, fear, resentment, arrogance, narcissism, and hatred. It perfectly explains why a movement built on pride would, upon achieving its declared goals, immediately begin behaving in ways far more oppressive than anything its own supposed oppressors did. This post "liberation" reaction showed up in the French Jacobins, and the Leninists, the Stalinists, and the Maoists later perfected it. We aren't there yet, but the pattern is unmistakable, as are the ideological underpinnings.

The Girondins lost their heads to their former Jacobin allies. The Mensheviks were eventually executed by their former Bolshevik allies. And now Western gays and lesbians have fallen into the basket of deplorables with their former adversaries. This year, your former allies worked together to disrupt your Pride parades in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Denver, and Boston and were successful in getting the Toronto parade canceled. How many elected Democrats came rushing to your defense?

Maybe pride isn't the best path forward. Maybe humility is a bit more appropriate instead of your current predicament. And maybe a political realignment is in order based not on who your enemies were centuries ago, but on who your enemies are now.

The Leftists never wanted anything to do with you other than to exploit you. The Islamists want to murder you. And now those two are best friends. That the ideologically blinded lemmings of the LGBTQ movement still treat inconspicuous Christian bakers and wedding photographers as the enemy is desperate, evasive, and cowardly.

And it's nothing to be proud of.