The Marquette University Pride Prom takes place on Saturday, April 14. It’s the first such event held on a Catholic university campus, ever. As an alumnus, I find it a remarkable moment of progress. When I studied at old MU, it would have been unthinkable to imagine an LGBTQ+ Resource Center or Alumni Council, much less a welcoming LGBTQ Pride Prom. It’s supported by dozens upon dozens of diverse MU organizations from the Arab and Muslim Women's Research and Resource Institute to the Marquette Panhellenic Association, and community organizations like Cream City Foundation and the LGBT Community Center as well as groups from Milwaukee School of Engineering and UW-Milwaukee.
Not surprisingly, the Pride Prom also has its detractors. One, TFP Student Action (TFP SA), has even conducted an online petition against it. When I stumbled on the TFP SA webpage last fall, the petition had already amassed 18,000 signatories. At the time I thought that was a lot of irate Marquette students, staff and alumni who didn’t like gay people. As it turns out, while some protesters may have a connection to MU (including a former MU professor), the organization behind the petition does not. As it turns out, the TFP SA is affiliated with the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (hence the TFP). Founded in Brazil in 1960, its mission is a cultural counter-revolution against progressive ideologies that undermine Christian culture (or, at least, their version of it).
Aside from the rabid denunciation of all things LGBTQ, the fact that the dance is being held in the Marquette student union has particularly piqued TFP’s ire. It seems there is a chapel in the union and in the chapel is the Blessed Sacrament and therefore gay folks frolicking in the temple precincts, so to speak, is especially abhorrent. Still, given the union’s daily comings and goings by sinners of any ilk, the place should have spontaneously combusted ages ago.
Anyway, beyond being anti-LGBTQ, the TFP opposes much too much to list here. However, a few tidbits deserve dishonorable mention, like “President Carter’s human rights policy,” the “retroactive lifting of the statue of limitations for civil cases involving sexual abuse,” the ecological movement, reproductive rights, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and pacifism. To be fair, TFP isn’t just against stuff, of course, it’s also for lots of things we associate with Christ’s teachings like Rosaries, guns and rule by the “elite.” Actually, it sounds rather like the Catholic cult in The DaVinci Code (which, by the way, the TFP deems heretical). Suffice it to say, it’s essentially the current Republican regime’s agenda for God, the Second Amendment and unbridled capitalism.
Interestingly, TFP preaches a very traditional concept of the “elite.” For that, its members have an ax to grind when it comes to egalitarianism (in general) and the Age of the Enlightenment (in particular). Needless to say, they would have rooted for the Romanovs.
Curiously, among the TPF’s many essays is an ominous line: “If elites decay, it is hard for them not to drag the people down with them.” Speaking of which, did you watch the Stormy Daniels interview?
