If Pride were being challenged only by a diminished, if persistent, religious right, then its recent setbacks could be dismissed as temporary. But in fact the challenges are more wide-ranging. Pride is now criticized not only by conservative Christians, but by progressive activists who make a claim on its deepest meaning. Long associated with youth and the future, it is bleeding support among young Americans. 

On June 2, 2024, protestors temporarily halted the Philly Pride Parade. They were not congregants of the Westboro Baptist Church or representatives of the Proud Boys but members of a group called Queers 4 Palestine. They held up a sign saying “No Pride in Genocide.” As they explained in a statement on Instagram, they viewed the city’s Pride parade as a symbol of oppression, not liberation: a “public-relations instrument used by the corporate arm of the state to divert public attention away from the configuration of violent, repressive policies and practices inflicted upon Queer people worldwide.”
The interruption was the latest sign of the challenges facing Pride, a monthlong holiday that has united corporations and activist groups, political leaders and self-styled dissidents in celebration not only of gay liberation but of queerness generally. After decades of increasing buy-in, Pride appears to be losing public legitimacy. The change is reflected in a corporate retreat from Pride-themed marketing, shifts in public opinion, and conflicts among progressive groups about the meaning of Pride.
Inspired by the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the first Pride parades took place in 1970 in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. As decades passed, Pride came to symbolize not only the increasing acceptance of sexual minorities, but the rising fortunes of an educated, urban professional class that valued self-expression, equality, and diversity. Marketers recognized this, and sought to exploit, in the words of Katherine Sender, a professor of communications at Cornell, the association between “same-sex eroticism and young, urban trendiness.” Alcohol companies, having little reason to fear alienating religious consumers, led the way.
In 2023, the backlash came. On April 1, the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted a picture on Instagram featuring a personalized can of Bud Light. The conservative commentator Matt Walsh called for a boycott. Kid Rock posted a video of himself shooting a case of the beer. Megyn Kelly compared drinking the beer to giving “a middle finger to women.” Bud Light’s sales declined by approximately 25 percent in a matter of weeks. Two executives associated with the Mulvaney promotion were placed on leave. Anheuser-Busch’s chief marketing officer stepped aside. Bud Light, the top-selling beer in the U.S. for twenty-two years, was dethroned by Modelo Especial.
Target faced similar criticism after social media accounts claimed that a size XS swimsuit advertised as having “light binding” in the chest and a “tuck-friendly” crotch was available for purchase in the children’s section. (Target officials responded that the suits were offered only in adult sizing and not intended for children.) Sales fell by 5 percent in the April-to-June period, the first such drop in six years.
Corporations took note. After years of increasing prominence, Pride commemorations were more subdued in 2024. Nike, which has offered Pride collections since 1999, declined to offer one this year. Target dropped Pride-themed childrenswear and offered Pride merchandise in only half its stores. Bud Light refrained from any Pride-themed advertising, instead highlighting its partnership with Dustin Poirier, a UFC fighter.

Due in part to these decisions by retailers, Pride was less prominent this year in the public spaces of American cities—as if Manhattan department stores had suddenly stopped doing Christmas displays. “I certainly haven’t seen a significant amount of pride items or flags outside, which kind of threw me because I live in a fairly progressive area,” lamented one commenter on the r/lgbt subreddit. “I’ve noticed this too,” wrote another. “Even when I was in the city I only saw a few.”

One reason Pride is less prominent in cities this year is that cities have other things to worry about. Despite its origins in rioting, Pride greatly benefited from the historic reduction in crime that American cities underwent in the 1990s. Cities suddenly became safe for the educated professionals whose values generally accorded with Pride, whether or not they happened to be LGBTQ.
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Obergefell was supposed to tame homosexuality, but it has precip­itated a regime of more radical queerness. From “Marriage is a human right” to “Marriage is deeply flawed and fundamentally violent”: The sexual left’s long-running dispute about the nature of marriage and its relation to gayness seems to be getting resolved in the direction of the marriage skeptics.

In November 2022, the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice came out against gay marriage. “I find it disappointing how much time and resources went into fighting for inclusion in the deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage,” Chase Strangio wrote on Instagram. Two months later, Taylor Silverman, a female skateboarder who gained prominence after objecting to the inclusion of biological males in women’s athletic competitions, criticized gay marriage from the opposite direction: “I used to think gay marriage was ok until all of the things that conservatives warned us would happen next actually happened. Now it seems it really was the beginning of the dangerous slippery slope.” With the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, the legal status of same-sex marriage has never been more secure. Public opinion is strongly in its favor, even as, not so long ago, it was overwhelmingly opposed. Yet the ideological case for same-sex marriage seems strangely fragile, subject to challenge on both the left and the right.
It has been eight years since the White House was lit with rainbow colors in celebration of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. Hailed as the enshrinement of a new consensus, the national recognition of same-sex marriage can also be understood as an event that accelerated polarization—leading some on the left to press for ever more changes, and some on the right to doubt the very possibility of liberal governance.
Not all of the effects of gay marriage are obvious, or were anticipated. In the runup to the national recognition of gay marriage, much attention was paid on both sides to such questions as whether children raised in same-sex households could thrive as did those raised by a mother and father. Important as they were, these discussions distracted from another way in which gay marriage would affect national life. Its recognition changed the makeup of the American elite by causing more conservative and religious actors to lose standing while left-wing activists gained power and prestige. For thoroughgoing progressives, there is nothing to lament in these developments. But for figures on the center-left, gay marriage has had an ambiguous legacy.
Gay marriage was the first great triumph of cancel culture. Sasha Issenberg, a historian of gay marriage, has observed that by deploying the novel weapons of “shaming and shunning,” activists “changed the economic terrain on which cultural conflict was waged.” One of the early breakthroughs occurred when eightmaps.com appeared online. The site used information gathered under financial disclosure laws to list the names and locations of people who had donated to California’s Proposition 8, a referendum that stated marriage could take place only between a man and a woman. Suddenly American citizens came under pressure for their political views—not just from their friends and families, but potentially from anyone with an internet connection. Some reported receiving envelopes with powder and death threats.
Donors to Proposition 8 were ­also targeted through their employers. Scott Eckern, the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, was forced to resign after his colleagues learned that he had backed the referendum. ­Brendan Eich was forced to step down as the CEO of Mozilla in 2014, when his past support of Proposition 8 was publicized.
Those who denounce cancel culture often speak as though it was hatched by radical activists and intolerant students, and see the contest as pitting liberal tolerance against illiberal denunciation. But as the history of gay marriage shows, the reality is more complicated. Cancel culture was pioneered in part by veteran political activists such as the lifelong Republican Fred Karger, who organized demonstrations outside commercial properties owned by backers of Proposition 8. And it arose in alliance with corporate power, as seen when corporations declared “capital strikes” by threatening to pull out of states that guaranteed religious freedom to those who rejected gay marriage.
In recent years, figures such as ­Andrew Sullivan have emerged as brave and eloquent critics of wokeness. They have opposed its particular injustices while exploring its deep origins. They have tied wokeness to the flowering of “illiberalism” on the left and the right. But they have failed to examine how these forms of illiberalism were encouraged by the campaign for a policy they support.
Gay marriage changed the character of important institutions in ways that its moderate supporters have not yet recognized. Through the operation of cancel culture, high-profile opponents of same-sex marriage were silenced, fired, or forced out of important institutions. In 2011, Paul Clement, the distinguished appellate lawyer and former solicitor general, was compelled to leave his law firm in order to continue his legal work on behalf of the Defense of Marriage Act, a case that his firm had been pressured to drop by the Human Rights Campaign. In 2015, Kelvin Cochran, the chief of the Atlanta fire department, was fired after writing a book that expressed opposition to homosexuality. In 2023, Jacob Kersey, a police officer in Georgia, was placed on leave after writing on Facebook: “God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church. That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage.”
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Populist Christianity associates piety with hearth and home, nation and place. The lead singer of the Pilgrim Jubilees, a gospel quartet, told an interviewer: “My brothers and I grew up in a little three-room shack in Houston, Mississippi. We didn’t have much back then, church, but we had a family altar.” This pride in a single place, however humble, and in a pious home, however plain, is typical of populist Christianity. 

No prejudice so perfectly unites the American overclass as contempt for morally conservative, religiously revivalist, and politically populist protestants. Every day, it seems, a prestige publication prints a new article describing them as sexist, racist, white-nationalist threats to democracy. Far more than the socialists who see themselves as radicals, backwoods Baptists and TV preachers, holy-rolling faith healers and strip-mall seminarians are hated and feared by our ruling class. No other group of comparable size consistently opposes those who run our society. That is why they are denounced so unsparingly, and why they deserve greater praise.
Populist Christianity took form in the early 19th century during the Second Great Awakening. Methodist circuit riders, Baptist preachers, and Mormon seers remade America’s religious landscape, proclaiming a populist creed that was no less revolutionary than the political transformation that had swept through the country in the decades before. As Nathan Hatch notes in his great book, The Democratization of American Christianity, its leaders were “short on social graces, family connections, and literary education.” They often seemed “untutored” and “irregular,” but this only proved their bona fides. Because they preached a creed that “associated virtue with ordinary people,” their lack of refinement vouchsafed their reliability.

The movements that sprang from the Second Great Awakening did not oppose all forms of authority. They instead tended to the elevation of a single leader, who was seen as vindicating the interests of the common man against an unaccountable elite. These men were entrepreneurial figures, adept in the latest methods of mass communication. They understood and frequently shared popular tastes. Unbound by old institutions, they built new ones in which they exercised unquestioned authority. Hatch describes the pattern: “The Methodists under Francis Asbury…used authoritarian means to build a church that would not be a respecter of persons.” Likewise, Mormons “used a virtual religious dictatorship…to return power to illiterate men.” Despite their tight control of their organizations, these men were seen as heralds of freedom, for they gave their followers the “right to think and act for themselves rather than depending upon the mediations of an educated elite.”

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