Dwain Northey

I always find it fascinating what people choose to be outraged by.

As Pride Month winds down, social media once again fills with declarations that rainbows have somehow become a threat to civilization. Think about that for just a second. A rainbow.

For generations, one of the very first things every preschooler learns is how to draw one. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Rainbows decorated classrooms, birthday parties, lunch boxes, stickers, and coloring books long before anyone’s political outrage machine decided visible light was controversial.

So what exactly are we supposed to tell three-year-olds now?

“Sorry, Timmy. Rainbows are dangerous. Crayons are political now.”

Should unicorns be canceled too? Leprechauns? Pots of gold? Are we going to ban The Wizard of Oz because Dorothy follows a colorful road?

The absurdity would be hilarious if it weren’t so exhausting.

One of the more ironic moments this year came when the San Francisco Giants announced players would wear a Bible verse on their caps instead of the Pride-themed logo they had worn previously. The verse chosen referenced God’s covenant with Noah after the flood—that the rainbow would be the sign that He would never again destroy the Earth by water.

Now here’s where the irony practically writes itself.

The rainbow wasn’t invented by the LGBTQ community. They adopted it because it symbolizes diversity, hope, and inclusion. Symbols evolve throughout history. The cross existed long before Christianity. The eagle has represented countless nations and empires. The olive branch has symbolized peace for thousands of years.

A symbol can carry more than one meaning.

Yet some people seem determined to “take back” the rainbow, as though visible wavelengths of sunlight have somehow been hijacked.

The entire argument becomes an exercise in hypocrisy.

If you believe the biblical story, then the rainbow belongs to everyone. It appears after storms whether you’re gay or straight, religious or atheist, conservative or liberal. Nature doesn’t stop to ask your politics before refracting sunlight through water droplets.

It simply exists.

And maybe that’s the lesson we’ve forgotten.

A rainbow isn’t an endorsement of anyone’s lifestyle. It isn’t a recruitment tool. It isn’t a conspiracy. It’s light behaving exactly as physics says it should.

If someone sees seven colors in the sky and immediately becomes angry because another group of people also uses those colors as a symbol of acceptance, perhaps the problem isn’t the rainbow.

Perhaps the problem is that we’ve become so conditioned to search for culture-war battles that we’ve declared war on sunlight.

That seems like an extraordinary amount of emotional energy to devote to a weather phenomenon.

This is, of course, just my opinion. But if your faith teaches that God created the rainbow as a promise of mercy, and someone else sees that same rainbow as a reminder that they deserve dignity and acceptance, I’m struggling to see the conflict.

One interpretation speaks of God’s grace. The other speaks of treating fellow human beings with compassion.

Those ideas don’t seem nearly as incompatible as some people insist they are.