Is it ethical for the Kennedy Center to cancel its “Pride Month” productions?

Yes, it is. Next question?

Oh, let’s bat this one around for a while. The AP reports that “Organizers and the Kennedy Center have canceled a week’s worth of events celebrating LGBTQ+ rights for this summer’s World Pride festival in Washington, D.C., amid a shift in priorities and the ousting of leadership at one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions. Multiple artists and producers involved in the center’s Tapestry of Pride schedule, which had been planned for June 5 to 8, told The Associated Press that their events had been quietly canceled or moved to other venues. And in the wake of the cancellations, Washington’s Capital Pride Alliance has disassociated itself from the Kennedy Center.” The more Trump-deranged and woke “Rolling Stone” put it this way: “The Kennedy Center’s war on the performing arts continues to wage on under the Trump administration as a series of events planned around Pride Month have quietly been canceled or relocated.”

“War on the performing arts”! Nice. It’s “war” when a theater venue that is supposed to represent and entertain all Americans stops pandering to group identity and propaganda.

Being a member, if perhaps an iconoclastic one, of the Washington theater community, I have many friends, colleagues and collaborators who are gay or otherwise LGBTQ in one way or the other. I assume most of them are furious about this development, and that is to be expected: 1) it hurts when a benefit is taken away even if it shouldn’t have been bestowed in the first place, and 2) few people are capable of admitting that an action is the correct one when their narrow interests are adversely affected. (See: USAID) Nonetheless, the decision by the Kennedy Center to stop warping its schedule to conform to “Pride Month” is exactly right, since the venue never should have begun celebrating minority sexual orientations and activities anyway.

“Pride Month” and all the other divisive and narcissistic “months” given over to celebrating and isolating a particular group are corrosive to societal, cultural and national unity and intrinsically unethical. Any of them could be initially justified as a short term measure designed to embrace a minority group that had previously been discriminated against; the problem is that there is never a way to end such celebrations without that finale seeming and feeling like a rejection, a slap in the face. Yeah, I understand the emotional reaction, friends, and grow the hell up. Adults shouldn’t need an annual platform from which to shout, “I’m proud of what I do with my naughty bits!” I don’t care what you do with your naughty bits, and you shouldn’t care what I do with mine.

If a “heterosexual pride” celebration would be deemed obnoxious, tasteless and unnecessary—and it would and should be—then it should be beyond rational dispute that a gay pride month is no different. Do I have to explain that “Black History Month,” “Women’s History Month” and, frankly, St. Patrick’s Day are in the same category from an ethics perspective? Why should the Irish get parades in New York City? Why no Greek parade, Armenian parade, German parade or Chinese parade? Why no Tourette’s Syndrome or Down Syndrome parade, if other groups get their annual celebration? This is why: there would be no limit to its, and no official had has had the guts to say to the previously anointed groups or tribes, “Okay, enough of this…you people don’t need special privileges, benefits and promotion any more. You’re Americans.”

The Kennedy Center is in trouble, however, if, as the angry leaders of the various LGBTQ groups whose “World Pride” performances have been cancelled hint, gay artists start boycotting the venue. [Aside: I had no idea that a “World Pride” event was held every two years in D.C., running from May 17 through June 8 this year with performances and celebrations planned across the city. I guess I’ve been distracted by World Sock Drawer Month.] I doubt that this will occur, however, because about 75% of all professional performance artists are somewhere in that alphabet label “LGBTQ+,” and most of them are still so proud that they won’t reveal that aspect of their identity in public.

Events like “World Pride” and designations like “Pride Month” are passenger cars in the DEI Ethics Train Wreck. I salute the Trump Administration for recognizing that fact, and having the courage to address it.