"Pride" is losing traction — even the BBC has noticed!

The BBC has finally noticed that Pride is losing friends.

Across Britain, Pride events have been cancelled or postponed, corporate sponsorship is becoming harder to secure, councils are withdrawing support and organisers themselves are warning that the old funding model is beginning to fail.

The BBC has an explanation: rising costs, commercialisation, corporate “rainbow-washing”, political opposition, the trans debate and councils deciding that taxpayers’ money might be better spent elsewhere.

All of those things matter. But there is another part of this story which its “In Depth” investigation somehow manages not to mention at all.

In recent years, a disturbing succession of men involved with Pride organisations have been convicted of, or subject to professional findings concerning, serious sexual offences against children. One prominent Pride organiser was sentenced to 24 years in prison for the rape of a 12-year-old boy.

That does not mean homosexuality and paedophilia are the same thing. They plainly are not, and collective guilt would be both unjust and intellectually dishonest.

But when a movement presents itself as “family friendly”, actively reaches out to children and young people, and simultaneously suffers repeated safeguarding scandals of this seriousness, surely journalists investigating why confidence in that movement is declining ought at least to mention them?

And behind all this lies a still deeper question which our culture has spent half a century teaching itself not to ask:

What is sex actually for?

The Catholic Church has never stopped answering it.

My latest for Catholic Unscripted: Why Is Pride Losing Friends? The Question the BBC Won’t Ask