Why I hate gay pride

First off, let's make one thing clear: I don't hate gay people. I judge people based on their personality and their sexuality matters very little to me (you probably hold that same viewpoint). That said, I think LGBT pride is really stupid.

I'll start out by saying that pride is a bad thing in general. Not only is it one of the seven deadly sins, it's considered the worst one of all. On wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins#Pride ), it says "As pride has been labelled the father of all sins, it has been deemed the devil's most prominent trait". It's the trait that Satan is most infamous for. Pride leads to self-obsession, arrogance, stubbornness, and all kinds of other awful character traits. Nothing good comes out of it. You might think pride is a good tool to boost your confidence, but wikipedia also states "As one might expect, pride is not always associated with high self-esteem but with highly fluctuating or variable self-esteem. Excessive feelings of pride have a tendency to create conflict and sometimes terminating close relationships, which has led it to be understood as one of the few emotions with no clear positive or adaptive functions", and I wholeheartedly agree with that.

Despite all of that, the public's perception is that it's one of the most beautiful and wonderful traits in existence. Everyone is encouraged to be proud of as many things as possible, all the time. In my opinion, people should only be proud of their achievements. If you work hard towards a certain goal and you reach that goal, you have something to be proud of. That's the only instance of pride I can get behind. It's silly to be proud of something you can't influence, like the country you were born in, the family you were born in, or the sexuality you were born with. These things aren't achievements. If you're proud of things like this, you're just inadvertently giving yourself all those horrible traits that pride inevitably brings, which turns discussions you may have about the thing you're proud of into a huge shitshow.

Which leads me to gay pride. I get that LGBT people like to celebrate the progress they've made over the last few decades, but I really think that should be done in a different way. Gay pride parades reinforce the idea that your sexuality should be a big part of your character, which it REALLY shouldn't be. People like that are living stereotypes, and they're usually annoying to be around (which puts homosexuality in a negative light).

More importantly, gay pride parades are always executed in a way that's really silly and over-the-top, making gay people look like lunatics. When you think about it, they're ASKING to be mocked. The result of that? It invites otherwise indifferent people to speak out against them. They're heavily baiting people to comment on how silly gay pride is, and then they claim that gays are the victim and they "face so much discrimination". That's how gay pride works: they're setting themselves up to be the victims, because being the biggest victim possible is what social justice is all about.

Most people that speak out against gay pride aren't homophobes, but the media makes it SEEM like they're all homophobes. It makes it seem like homophobia is a much more common than it really is, which probably makes LGBT people unnecessarily uncomfortable.

Some people argue that gay pride was invented to "celebrate the right to exist without persecution" (which they don't have in some countries http://i.imgur.com/WXl1StD.png ). That's part of it, but you can't deny that the main theme of gay pride is being proud to be gay (that's what the term literally implies). Also, if you want to spread the "right to exist without persecution" to other countries, this is a really inefficient way to go about that.

That's why I hate gay pride.