Don's Tuesday Column

       THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/06/2023

Pride is among the 7 deadly sins

The Republican Red, White and Blue dinner is this Saturday, the 10^th, at the Veterans Hall, 735 Oak St. 5:00 Social Hour; 6:00 Dinner and Program with speakers. Tickets at Tehamagop.org, 921-2300 or 864-6685.

An age-old adage: If you’re not a liberal (now progressive or socialist) when you’re young, you haven’t got a heart; if you’re still a liberal when you’re 40, you haven’t got a brain. According to data from Nate Cohn with the New York Times, millennials are shifting towards the Republican Party. Even more so if they’ve stopped watching network and cable content. Dan Bongino’s podcast (Rumble.com/c/Bongino) is very popular.

It was the “trip and fall” seen ‘round the world; PINO (President-In-Name-Only) Joe Biden’s foot found a small sandbag as he turned to leave the stage of the Air Force cadets’ graduation. I noticed the obvious: Biden turned to his left and shifted into his “fake trot”: his little affected spurt when entering stages with the pumped fist, bent arm, make-believe sprint for a few steps. It’s an attempt to message vitality belied by every other physical indication.

We’ve all occasionally done it crossing a road: A car politely stops, we pointlessly move our arms, shoulders, maybe even legs, like we’re hurrying without going any faster. It’s a Jerry Seinfeld skit.

You can chuckle but, in Biden’s case, it’s a pathetic mental reflex. On a small stage, you need to observe what’s in front of your feet. Biden, perhaps to impress the young graduates, went into “fake trot” vitality mode, leaning forward without a glance down and…pratfall needing 3 Secret Service men to assist after failing to get up. It’s the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” medical alert commercial.

Dan Bongino noticed it; having been a Secret Service man with prep, on-site, and close-in protective detail experience, he said they would never leave a sandbag in the possible path of a president. Sandbags are placed on the crowd side of “bicycle rack” barriers, not on the side where the president would be walking. Biden simply forgot, as he often observably does, to turn to his right where there were no sandbags. It’s worse than anyone knows.

Also worse than anyone now knows: The revelations in an FBI-held form FD-1023, its 6 pages containing details of a $5 million “contribution” to the Bidens in exchange for policy changes. The devastating facts: This occurred when Joe was Vice President; the country, and policy changes, are documented therein.

Republicans Comer and Grassley were told this by an informant/whistleblower with a long record of trusted work with the FBI. It’s called Bribery, listed as a cause for impeachment and removal from office.

The so-called “Seven deadly sins,” from which all other sins follow, are: Pride, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Sloth and Envy. While the concept of “sin” reflects “fire and brimstone” preaching to many, there are practical reasons to avoid them all.

However, the irony of naming a month, even a cultural movement, for “Pride” is disconcerting. Why not a “Lust,” “Anger,” or “Envy” month? Talk host Dennis Prager wrote about excessive, inordinate pride. Prager, as a practicing Jew, explained that Jewish athletes don’t get much credit, but that Jewish scientists and Nobel Prize winners do. They’re not, however, proud because they are Jews but because of their innate abilities.

Pride is a slippery slope; the positive self-esteem side features a healthy sense of accomplishment for jobs or goals well done. If a genuine benefit or blessing to others, lives are improved and inspired.

“Pride is normally counted as the first of the deadly sins, because it can and often does lead to the commission of other sins in order to feed one's pride. Taken to the extreme, pride even results in rebellion against God, through the belief that one owes all that he has accomplished to his own efforts, and not to God's grace.” (Learnreligions.com) Leaving God aside, you can surely see the downside, the dark side, to pride. Without any moral perspective, one can be (many have been) proud of all manner of perfidy and evil.

Which brings us to “Pride month,” an apparent uplifting of something that adherents claim is not their choice—they were “born this way.” The slope: From de-criminalizing homosexuality, to acceptance of lifestyle choices, to allowing “marriage” of same-sex couples, to demanding gay priests and church leaders in spite of major religious condemnation of homosexuality, to demanding that adoption groups place children with gay couples despite their religious objections.

Annual “Pride” events have featured public displays of licentiousness and lewd, sexually provocative homosexual behavior. With the trans (aka sex change) cult, has the slope reached its nadir, where one crude commenter noted that it’s become a movement of “perverts, freaks, child groomers and mutilators”?

The group “Gays Against Groomers” consists of gay men and lesbian women, who live normal lives with their chosen partners, deserve no earthly judgement, and seek no prideful recognition. They reject the “transexual” splinter that want children sexualized, their parents marginalized, their normal puberty blocked, their young bodies subjected to chemical castration, and their perfectly formed bodies butchered to serve a sinfully “proud” concept of “gender identity.”