Pride Month Defeat or a Strategic Retreat

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think there's an extent to which conservative conservatives are
triumphant and exultant over the seeming defeat of transgenderism that
the Trump victory in twenty twenty four symbolizes, and that
the continued Trump actions regarding are symbolizing. I think people

(00:28):
are noticing fewer corporations going all in for Pride Month,
the disgusting celebration of the first of the seven Deadly
sins in some ways. So by the way, the idea
of the seven deadly sins, I think it's rooted somewhere biblically,

(00:49):
the concept of the seven deadly sins, I think it's
in Saint Paul somewhere. And the idea behind the category
of the seven deadly sins that's kind of developed by
the Catholic Church was it's not that these are specific,
concrete sins. It's sort of more that these are motivations
for sin, attitudes that lead you to sin, and that's
why they are deadly. These attitudes that lead you into sin,

(01:13):
and pride is always the first on the list. Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, greed, envy, sloth.
There you go, Catholic school education right here. Pride is
always the first on the list. Why well, all sin

(01:33):
is at a certain level a question of pride. I
am putting my will above that of God. So in
a certain way, pride is the underlying factor of every sin.
It is a human being placing his will or her

(01:59):
will above God will. So anyway great for a political
cultural movement to clothe itself in that garb. Now there
does seem, at least anecdotally, there does seem to be
less of an emphasis on Pride Month this year than

(02:20):
in prior years. People I know have gone to Target
for example, have sort of felt this. And there's a
piece from the Washington Stand written by S. A. McCarthy
that talks about this. Pride Month twenty twenty five has
begun not with a bang but a whimper, seemingly continuing
a trend as corporations and institutions back away from celebrating

(02:43):
the LGBT agenda. According to a report from Gravity Research,
nearly forty percent of corporate executives have muted their pride
promotion this year, while no executives reported plans to increase
their pride messaging. The majority of the scaling back will
impact public facing initiatives, including advertising and merchandising, while internal

(03:06):
pride operations such as workplace events or activities in corporate
donations to LGBT activist organizations will quote remain largely intact. However,
even many of these corporate donations are now being made
quietly or even anonymously, in an effort to avoid backlash.
All right, so what is this meaning. I think that
conservatives are maybe declaring victory here a little too soon,

(03:30):
and we need to remember some history. All right, let's
go back to two thousand and four. November two thousand
and four, George W. Bush is re elected president over
John Kerry. One of the big policy points that helps

(03:55):
him is that a bunch of states had ballot initiatives
to limit marriage as being between a man and a woman,
to define marriages between a man and a woman. That
helped him with voter turnout. I think it was a
long shot for George W. Bush to lose regardless. I

(04:17):
think the Iraq War had started the year prior, the
public sentiment against the Iraq War had not really developed
by that time. I don't think that was really until
two thousand and six that that really that that turn
really came. But it's clear that George W. Bush wins.

(04:38):
He wins a majority of the popular vote, he wins
fairly decisively over John Kerry, and he's seen as being
the main between him and Carrie. He's seen as far
more behind these Republican led efforts in state after state
after state to define marriages between a man and a woman,
the pro marriage side seems strong, indomitable. Within ten years,

(05:13):
the entire pro marriage side collapses. Oberga FeLV Hodges has passed,
and gay marriage is the law of the land and
is culturally widely accepted. The show Modern Family, I think
had a lot to do with that. The ABC television
show Modern Family, which was extremely popular for an extremely

(05:36):
long time and was extremely pro gay marriage specifically, I
think had a lot to do with shifting cultural attitudes
when it comes to LGBT stuff as did you know,
stuff like the way California changed its law and its
messaging and you know, messages in public schools, and the

(05:56):
tenor of rising millennial voters who had very different ideas
about this, who had been educated indoctrinated into pro LGBT
views during school, once they became voters, it really shifted
the tide. The Obama Revolution even though Obama was allegedly
pro what was allegedly anti same sex marriage, everyone sort

(06:19):
of knew with a wink and a nod that he
really wasn't that he was not in favor of marriage
being just between a man and a woman. So what
I'm saying is, yeah, it looks like we are winning
right now, but stuff changes. Stuff can change very quickly.
And the attitude that corporations are taking towards the LGBT

(06:43):
agenda right now is clearly, I think, a strategic retreat,
not full on. Again, let's look at this article again.
They're scaling back public facing initiatives, but internal events, workplace activities,

(07:13):
et cetera. And critically, corporate donations are largely intact. Corporate
donations to pro LGBT nonprofits are largely intact. Okay, the
Trevor Fund or whatever that organization's name is, the pro

(07:34):
transgender organization, Trevor Foundation. Yeah, the Trevor Foundation or the
Trevor Project, excuse me, is still getting tons and tons
and tons of money. And the whole premise of the
Trevor Foundation is to prevent the alleged epidemic of suicide

(07:58):
among kids who want to trade transition to a different
gender but can't because of evil, oppressive parents who don't
believe in transgenderism. That that whole narrative of the Trevor
Foundation is still getting backed, which is largely false, and
there's no solid evidence that transgender surgeries do anything to

(08:20):
help children's mental health. The Trevor Foundation is still getting
tons of money. So this is what I see happening
here is the notion of there's a kind of a
corporate retreat on this, But I don't think it's a
full retreat. They're not stopping donations, they're not stopping their

(08:41):
internal work on this subject. Which makes me think four
years from now, if a Democrat's elected president, it all
comes back. I mean, I think that is highly probable

(09:03):
that if a different president comes along, this could change. Now,
what are some reasons why it won't change? Why? Why
are there? Okay, so obviously all right, Gerardi or you're
drawing this connection between the gay marriage fights from twenty
four to twenty fourteen. You're saying that could happen with

(09:24):
transgenderism from twenty twenty four to twenty thirty four. Are
you sure this is purely apples to apples? No, I mean,
the situation is different, and I could see differences that
could lead to the anti transgender side of which I
am a leading member at this point, continuing to have

(09:44):
strength and vitality. Why Well, in two thousand and four,
when Republicans were passing you know, marriage initiative after marriage
initiative after marriage and initiative, who was voting for it?
It was Boom who was either not yet able to

(10:05):
vote or just started as voters and were not a
very sizable portion of the electorate. Yet millennials, all the
millennials supported gay marriage, and they were just chomping at
the bit for their opportunity to turn eighteen and start voting.
So the rising tide of younger voters was the death

(10:28):
knell for the pro natural marriage position. Well, that dynamic
is not really happening right now. Younger voters, Zoomer voters
if you will. Gen Z zoomers and jen Alpha, which
is coming up right behind them, are not as unifically

(10:51):
liberal as millennials were. If anything, gen Z males are
quite conservative. And I actually talked with a mom about
this over the last weekend who was saying, you know,

(11:12):
her three kids, they were all COVID kids, as she
called them. They were all in school from twenty twenty
through you know, twenty twenty two, during COVID, during which
they were locked out of school, online school, and they
saw all of the woke nonsense, a lot of which

(11:36):
happened during the time of COVID, The peak woke nonsense
happened during the COVID era. All the defund the police,
the height of pro LGBT stuff that THEI the early
Biden administration, all that was during you know, the COVID pandemic.
And she believed this. Mom. I talked too, and I

(12:00):
think she is right that that whole generation of kids
thinks that that time was BS. Kids who got locked
down in high school, kids have got locked down in college,
kids have got locked out, and afterwards came out of
it thinking, wow, was that necessary? How much of that

(12:23):
were we lied to about? How much of that was BS?
How much of that was adult overly officious, you know,
over credentialed liberal busybodies telling us what to do when
none of it was necessary. That ruined two years of
high school for me, That ruined two or three years

(12:44):
of college for me, That ruined middle school for you know,
et cetera. So I could and this questioning of authority
that it has prompted in all kinds of ways, and frankly,
liberals still maintain cultural hegemonic authority, you know. That's the

(13:11):
weird thing. Liberals still want to kind of paint themselves
as the young revolutionaries protesting against the man, the thought
being that the man is an old conservative, Christian white male,
and at this point that's not who the man is, right.

(13:34):
The man is someone like Hillary Clinton, an old liberal
lady who believes every single liberal priority, and that all
of corporate America, all of the main bastions of media,

(13:55):
they all align on this. In fact, I saw this.
There's a band called Rise Against that I guess as popular,
and they had a tweet that they sent out on
June second that said keep your homophobia out of our

(14:17):
revolution please, And I saw someone on Twitter retweeted quote
tweeted it with the caption, I have the same politics, Like,
so here's this band that, yeah, we're part of the revolution,
so don't be homophobic, And they have a pride flag
put onto like the logo for their band, and uh,

(14:43):
someone quote tweeted it with the caption, I have the
same politics as Blackrock, Amazon, and Google. You've never met
a revolutionary like me before, I mean, and that's true.
Liberals still want to think of themselves as revolutionaries. Oh yeah,
we're sticking it to themand to the authority. And it's like, well,

(15:05):
no game. Marriage was forced on the country without any
lawmaking by the Supreme Court. Transgenderism is being shoved, chiefly
by corporate America. Gay marriage became popularized because of the

(15:25):
Walt Disney Corporation and a television program they pumped through
the tube in your living room on ABC called Modern
Family that brainwashed all of you. The transgender thing is again, yeah, again,
being promoted by huge corporations like Black Rock, Amazon, Go.

(15:48):
I mean even you know, the whole pro abortion position
is massively backed by corporate America. So this this liberal
desire to position themselves ooh, we're revolutionaries. When will that
go away? I'll tell you when it'll go away. It'll
go away when boomers die. Liberalism as continued rebellion against

(16:14):
your parents. Next on the John Girardi Show, talking about
Pride Month and how muted it is, and this constant
liberal need to sort of position themselves as yeah, we're
the revolutionaries. We're speaking up against the man. We're fighting
the powers that be, not those oppressive Christian white male oppressors,

(16:38):
the religious right that's dominating everything. And it's like, Okay,
the religious right has not been powerful since I don't know,
two thousand and four. The religious right is not very powerful.
The religious right can barely get Donald Trump to do
anything pro life, well, anything controversially pro life or Trump

(17:02):
has done a lot for the pro life CAUs I
shouldn't say that, but he certainly put his parameters out
like I'm not going this far, and this notion that
we're the left and we're revolutionaries, you're fighting against the man.
Where does this come from? I honestly think the left

(17:23):
is going to continue to try to paint itself and
its political movement in those kinds of sticking it to
the man terms. They're going to keep doing that until
all their baby boomer parents die. I honestly think that's true.
I think so much. It's hard because I don't like

(17:44):
judging people's motives. I like judging people more on well,
I don't like judging people. I like judging actions and
objective things that I can see, And it's hard to
read into people's motives, but a lot of the extra
ternal signs seem to point, for very many liberals to

(18:07):
a lot of liberal activism, liberal posturing. At the individual level.
A lot of it seems like a working out of
resentments against conservative parents or even parents who are liberal
but just sort of more normal, like Hillary Clinton voting

(18:29):
Democrats rather than Bernie Sanders. Heit's like, you look at
there a good example of this. You look at Doug
m Hoff's daughter. Okay, so, Kamala Harris's husband, Doug m Hoff.
His daughter is Ella Amov, who is a fashion designer

(18:54):
and model born in nineteen ninety nine, and so is
his daughter from his prior marriage before he married Kamala Harris.
And she's a flipping weirdo the way she dresses her tattoos.

(19:15):
She's a fashion model, which I've not understood. She's very
androgynous and very deliberately intentionally so. And so much of
it seems like this very conscious sort of self projection
branding on her part, Like what is she kind of

(19:36):
rebelling against. She presents this attitude like oh yeah, this
eh independent thinker and I'm different, I'm this artiste. It's like, well, yeah,
your dad is a super rich lawyer. Your stepmom was
the Vice President of the United States. Sorry, if I'm
not buying this notion you're trying to sell me that

(19:59):
you're some kind of ooh cutting edge not gonna listen
to the man artiste. Sorry, I don't know. I just
don't find that convincing. Lena Dunham was another one like that,
Lena Dunham who grew up in around New York with
again super liberal parents, but normally liberal parents, and then

(20:20):
she's like, Oh, I'm so avant garde and I'm so different.
Lena Dunham, who's the director who made the television show
Girls and wrote the television show Girls and has done
basically nothing significant since then. But there was a period
in the twenty tens where everyone in Hollywood was convinced
she was the muse of our age. She's pretty much

(20:41):
exactly my age. I think she's about thirty seven years old,
and she kept trying to do this avant garde stuff,
and everyone eventually realized this seems like she's got a
lot of mental health problems and her work is not
that interesting and is not selling well. So no one
got more. Second and third and fourth and fifth chances

(21:03):
in Hollywood than Lena Dunham for some bizarre reason. But
it's like, who are you rebelling against? Like your moderate
Democrat parents who allowed you to imbibe all this extreme
liberal stuff, who are you rebelling against? I think liberals
are going to continue to try to pattern themselves as

(21:25):
revolutionaries until they have no more people to revolute against.
When we return conservative influencers and how they talk and
think about marriage. A soliloquy on marriage from the John
Girardi Show, that's next. So there's this one conservative influencer,

(21:47):
this guy Jack Posobiec, and I can't keep all these
guys straight. There's a bunch of these different right wing
sort of Twitter influencer guys, and I realize I'm falling
into this man's trap. Basically, they tweet inflammatory things and

(22:07):
then get people to respond to them on Twitter, and
then that actually gets them some money and also a
lot of attention. So I am falling into this trap.
And yet here I go because it's I think consistent
with a lot of the ways in which right wingers
on social media talk about, specifically the topic of marriage.

(22:29):
So again, just a little about Jeff Sobiek. He's forty
years old. He is a former United States Naval Intelligence officer.
He's very super pro Trump. Let's see, he used to
have a show on a n N the cable news
thing and now he I think he's got a show

(22:52):
that he does for Turning Point USA. Okay, so generic
pro Trump, conservative right wing influencer dude. And one thing
that's been going on a lot among sort of youth
social media am I youth social media A thirty seven
year old man. God helped me is a lot of

(23:13):
discussion about marriage and the topic of trad wives has
become this sort of phenomenon on various social media outlets Instagram,
this idea of women embracing more fully roles sort of
more normative appearing roles within the household, as a stay

(23:37):
at home mom who's the chief homemaker. And some of
that is very positive if you know that a lot
of the worst expressions of feminism denigrated women who made
that kind of a choice for their lives. And I

(24:00):
think it's positive that women, especially young women, are presented
with being a stay at home mom as something that's
a positive thing and a good thing and not a
thing to be sneered at in any way, shape or form,
and that there's actually something positive and beautiful about that

(24:21):
kind of a life. Now, the problem is when it
kind of devolves into I don't know, weird stereotypes, and
when it devolves into I think, sort of rigid conceptual norms.

(24:42):
These rigid norms about what marriage is supposed to be
that they only make sense, I think coming from people
who haven't actually been married or are in very weird marriages,
I'll put it that way. It's led to a bunch
of social media influencers saying stuff like, and women are terrible.
They expect men to do you have household chores and

(25:04):
they don't do anything, and blah blah blah blah blah.
And I'm just not sure that it's because modern women
are so particularly so particularly worthless and weak or anything
like that. There does seem to be indications that millennial
aged fathers spend much more time with their children than

(25:25):
prior generations of fathers did. I'm not sure if that's
true or not my anecdotal experience. I don't know that
I spend less time more. I don't know that I
spend more time with my kids necessarily than my dad
did with me. But I could kind of see some

(25:48):
anecdotal evidence to suggest that maybe that's true among millennial
fathers anyway, that millennial fathers are more willing to do
household chores that some of the older stereotypes of oh
he never ever changed a paper, That is not true
of millennial fathers. And so there's this sense among some
of these right wing influencers that if you're your men,

(26:10):
shouldn't do household chores. So this guy posts, this guy,
Jack Pisobiac, he issues this tweet hot debate going around.
If you earn one hundred percent of the money, should
you have to do fifty percent of the childcare and
household chores. Now, it's not the answer to that that

(26:35):
I find annoying or difficult. It's the framing of the question.
And it has to do with marriage and what marriage
is and how marriage should be. And I've been thinking
a lot more about this. I just had Holly and
I just celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary. We're expecting our
sixth child. And you know, I probably wouldn't talk about

(26:59):
it if we were in an unhappy state in our marriage.
But I will say I think I'm extremely happy in
my marriage, and my marriage is the one thing over
anything else in my life. Certainly have wonderful relationships with
my family and with my mom, and with friends, and
fulfilling work and all kinds, and I love my children

(27:20):
very dearly, and there are all kinds of things that
give me strength and happiness. But short of my relationship
with God, the number one thing that is the anchor
in my life is my relationship with my wife. And
I think my wife and I have a particularly I'm
I don't want to I don't like sounding braggy or

(27:41):
things like that, but I do think I prodigiously lucked out.
I was prodigiously blessed to have married the woman that
I did. That I think she is a particularly perfectly
suited match for me. That we think alike on so much,
our personalities mesh so wonderfully. We rarely fight, if ever,

(28:10):
I think trying to think like the worst fight of
our marriage. I'm not sure what it is, because we
just don't really fight very much. And I'm thinking about this, like,
I just feel like this sort of an approach to marriage.
If you earn one hundred percent of the money, should

(28:30):
you have to do fifty percent of the chores, to
which I would say maybe because that that kind of questioning,
It reveals a lack of understanding of marriage. It reveals
a lack of comprehension of what you've committed to. You

(28:58):
committed as traditional Christian Catholic wedding vow say to for better,
for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in
health till death do you part. That's what you committed to.

(29:18):
You've committed to giving yourself entirely completely to your wife.
So to put an arbitrary limit on it seems like
you're putting a limit on love. Like these guys make

(29:40):
you this existential point. Oh, I would never change a diaper.
You're not gonna see me mopping up the kitchen. So
a couple of thoughts. First of all, I feel like
maybe I'm in a different boat than a lot of people.
You know, I recognize I have five children. We have

(30:03):
not had a house without diapers in ten years, so
maybe our experience is different. But this seems like a
bit more of an experience of people who only have
two kids. That the house isn't you know, We're we're
constantly playing catch up with cleaning and housework and things

(30:24):
like that. So maybe maybe these experiences of me as
a five kid have her rather than you know, a
two kid have her. But my wife is working really
hard taking care of our kids. She homes schools the three,
all the school age ones. We're homeschooling all the old

(30:44):
the school age ones. She is pregnant with our sixth child.
She the work. The extent of the sacrifices she makes
for our family are tremendous for me to lead off
a conversation with her by saying, well, given that I
earn one hundred percent of our income, I think what

(31:10):
an ungrateful way of phrasing that my work is not
more difficult than her work. Okay, in many in some
ways it's easier. Maybe in some ways it's more difficult.
It's not more difficult, though. It's a giving of my

(31:32):
whole life, just as it's a giving of her whole life.
And I think I would need to do an examination
of conscience to ask myself I am I as committed
to my work as my wife is committed to her work.
So to lead off a conversation by well, I make

(31:55):
this much and you're not making Jack so when she
could say, what is the reason you're able to give
this much to your work? Is because I am helping
care for your children. That's why. So to start a
debate like that just seems so ridiculous. And then this

(32:19):
is hardly a unique marriage insight. But I'll just say this,
there's no I can think of nothing more destructive in
a marriage than keeping score.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
I did the dishes three nights, so you need to
do the dishes four nights. Because I make more money
than you, Therefore you need to do more of the
household chores than I do. Who thinks like that? What
the hell are you doing? What a weird.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
Way of thinking about life? A life shared in common
with someone. You know? What I do when I see
my wife is you know, stressed out, tired, exhausted, and
stuff needs cleaning and I don't have something to do.
I go and I help clean a thing. I'll empty
a load of dishes, I'll put in a new load

(33:08):
of dishes, I'll put in the soap, I'll hit start
on the dishwasher. It takes five minutes, and I haven't
turned into a homosexual as a result. I do lots
of household chores, but My weekends are basically consumed with it.
And you know what I've found over time, and I
think this is kind of the virtue that marriage helps

(33:32):
promote the kinds of virtues. A virtue being a habitual
state of mind, a habitual disposition to choose the good
and avoid the evil. That's what virtue is. Habitual. It's
a hobby tooose your clothing. It's like as close to
you as the clothes you wear is. I find myself

(33:53):
on weekends wanting to do household chores, wanting to help
my wife clean, just to make her life easier, to
make our home more orderly, to make her happy. Making
her happy makes me happy. And it's not because I'm
some great saint or anything. It's just this is how

(34:17):
a life shared tends to form you and shape you.
And that's that's what marriage ought to be. It's not
a keeping score of you did this and I did this,
so when you're going to be no, it's not a
I do fifty percent and you do fifty percent. I
contribute sixty six percent of the finances, so you need

(34:40):
to contribute thirty three percent of the finances, and then conversely,
do sixty six percent of the household choice, So I
do thirty three percent. No, you all give one hundred
percent of everything. That's what marriage actually calls you to.
It's one hundred percent, one hundred percent, one hundred percent,
one hundred and fifty percent, because it's love. It's I
I'm giving you my whole life. You're giving me your

(35:03):
whole life, including within this total gift of self, her
fertility and children that might result from this and last
thing I'll say about this to do this kind of well,

(35:26):
if you make a one hundred percent of the money,
you shouldn't do fifty percent of the household choice. Maybe
you have to do one hundred percent because maybe your
wife gets cancer. Maybe you have to do one hundred
percent because your wife gets in a car accident and
breaks your leg. Maybe you have to do one hundred
percent because your wife just gave birth to your child
and had a see section and she can't walk for

(35:47):
a week. This kind of measuring out, it refuses to
account for human frailty and weakness. And I have to
accept and by the way, those what ifs, they will
happen one hundred percent certainty they will happen, because we're

(36:07):
all gonna die someday, either you or your spouse will
be dead. They will probably get sick beforehand. And whatever
little setup you've got about you do fifty percent and
I do thirty. All that crap goes out the window
because that's what love demands. It doesn't demand you do fifty,

(36:29):
I do fifty. It demands I do one hundred and
you do one hundred. And if that changes because of circumstance,
you accept that. You step up to the plate in
this spirit of love because you love this other person,
because you don't view them as a con you know,
a contributor to a household economy. You view them as

(36:50):
your spouse, your wife, the love of your life. So
any young people think about getting married, don't think about
marriage like that. Think about marriage as one one hundred percent,
not fifty to fifty. When we return, the Navy renames
a ship that had been named for Harvey Milk, and
Gavin Newsom's all upset. Next on The John Girardi Show,

(37:14):
Pete Hegseth in maybe my favorite thing he's done since
he's become Defense Secretary, has stripped the name Harvey Milk
from a US Navy vessel, the USS Harvey Milk and
ABC News covering it as outraged. Oh, at the start
of Pride Month. How could they do that? And the

(37:35):
timing was intentional to do it at the start of
Pride Month? How could they? Gavin Newsom's all upset. He says,
Harvey Milk wasn't just a civil rights icon. He was
a Korean War combat veteran whose commander called him outstanding.
Stripping his name from a Navy ship won't erase his
legacy as an American icon, but it does reveal Trump's
contempt for the values our veterans fight to protect. Harvey

(37:59):
Milk was now for other things, more so than his
Korean War service, you know, like pederasty. That'll do it
for the John Girardi Show. See you next time on
Power Talk.