Another Pride month has passed and the world is still standing | Opinion

Another Gay Pride month with its triumphant rainbow flags fluttering in the breeze has passed again and the world did not end. No cities were destroyed by fire and brimstone a la Sodom and Gomorrah. The sun still rises in the East every day and the world continues the same planetary path it has followed for billions of years.

The only thing about Gay Pride month that annoys me is that I bought colorful brochures to recruit and indoctrinate some handsome men to become gay. That was money wasted because not one man converted to the gay lifestyle. Not one.

The hateful homophobes get their knickers in a twist because the LGBTQ community rallies around its rainbow flag to celebrate life and diversity. The religious fundamentalists claim that flying these flags blasphemes the covenant God made with humankind after Noah’s Great Flood. According to these wannabe self-styled prophets, the rainbow is God’s sign that he will never again punish mankind with water, preferring to turn his marvelous Earth into smoking cinder ashes.

I wonder why the haters think they have exclusive rights to appropriate rainbows to perpetuate their hate-filled hope for divine retribution as a response to the objectionable lifestyles of the LGBTQ community. The rainbow is nothing but the refraction of lights in drops of water wafting through the air and as such occur over the whole earth. Every human society has superstitions and folklore attached to rainbows. I seriously doubt that cultures of the Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, Eskimos, aborigines, and hundreds of people alive at the time of Noah not mentioned in the Bible do not acknowledge this purported covenant.

In Greek myths, the rainbow is a path between heaven and earth. Celtic folklore claims there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Norse stories say rainbows connect people with their pagan gods in the Aesir. The Hindu god Indra uses the rainbow as a weapon and Buddhists associate it with enlightened consciousness. Native Americans see rainbows as bridges between the physical and spiritual worlds and are regarded as sign of hope.

But let’s explore the physics behind rainbows in more detail. When airplane passengers see rainbows they are complete circles. Double rainbows are very common but the order of the spectral colors is reversed in the innermost rainbow. Triple rainbows are not uncommon and there is one well-documented photograph of a quintupled rainbow. Exactly what is God trying to tell us with these confusing multiplicities of rainbows? Is he undecided about what to do next or just showing off? Why reverse the order of the colors of the spectrum in double rainbows? Does God have dyslexia? Enquiring minds want to know.

But hold your horses. Why are the fundamentalists giving the Rainbo Bread Company a free pass? Is Kermit the Muppet risking his eternal soul because he sang The Rainbow Connection song? Will children be condemned because they play with Rainbow Brite dolls?

I have to be vigilant because I think my Rainbow vacuum cleaner is inciting an insurrection in the broom closet.

Roger Guffey is a retired teacher in Lexington.