This past weekend brought thousands of people who identify as LGB, or TQ+, to Washington, D.C. for the 2025 World Pride festival. It also brought a public safety controversy, followed by a smattering of violence. The incidents provide a window into the LGBT ideology underlying the celebration of Pride, which involves a thorough rejection of God’s design for humanity.

The incidents drawing the most attention took place in DuPont Circle, an important hub in northwest D.C,. where five roads intersect, rotating around a circular park with the diameter of a football field (endzones included). The circle is surrounded by swanky nightlife attractions, foreign embassies, and think tanks ranging from the American Enterprise Institute to the Brookings Institution. People who identify as LGBT also associate the circle with past activism, and in recent years, the circle has been the site of a popular but unsanctioned after-party following D.C. Pride parades.

While this afterparty was in full swing, around 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, two teens were stabbed near the park during a fight. Then, at 7:52 p.m., the crowd fled at the sound of gunfire; a man was shot in the foot at a nearby Metro entrance. Fortunately, all three victims survived and were transported to a local hospital.

In the week before the event, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith first asked the National Park Service (NPS) to close the circle to prevent any violence. Then, she rescinded the request after backlash from LGBT activists. A police spokesperson stated, “Chief Pamela A. Smith has heard from community members and understands how significant Dupont Circle Park is to the Pride celebration.” And whatever LGBT activists want cannot be denied.

On June 4, NPS Superintendent Kevin Greiss rejected Smith’s rescinding of her initial request, stating, “I continue to completely concur with Chief Smith’s first assessment and the facts relayed in her second assessment that support the need for a closure.” He cited past incidents related to Pride afterparties, including underage drinking, pot-smoking, and fighting in 2024, vandalism causing $175,000 in damage to a historic fountain in 2023, and gunshots in the park in 2019. Accordingly, NPS erected 8-foot-tall fencing around the park at 5 a.m. Friday morning.

But that solution was unsatisfactory to LGBT activists, so it was also unsatisfactory to the D.C. government. After working “overnight” on a solution, NPS and the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) agreed to remove the fencing around DuPont Circle. Instead, the city erected a fence around the fountain to protect it from vandalism. In a joint statement, NPS and the mayor’s office announced, “The D.C. Government has assumed primary responsibility for the maintenance of public health, safety and protection of natural and cultural resources in Dupont Circle Park, from June 7 until June 9, 2025.”

To review, based on a pattern after recent Pride parades, NPS determined the best way to prevent crime — that is, to protect people from crime — in DuPont Circle was to place the whole park off-limits. But LGBT activists refused to accept this consideration of their own safety because it interfered with their party. These activists pressed the city so hard to reverse the decision that NPS finally washed its hands in disgust and insisted that the city take responsibility for the consequences. NPS only insisted on a fence to protect its property from vandalism, instead of one that protected people.

Within hours, the original decision by NPS to fence off the whole park was vindicated. Before the sun went down, a fight among juveniles resulted in a double stabbing, and a man was shot in a separate incident. After the second incident, city police ordered the crowd to disperse. Police then cordoned off the entire park with crime scene tape for all of Sunday — an unusually long time, residents noted.

Of course, it’s possible that the violence would have occurred without the Pride party in DuPont Circle. Overnight, two more shootings (one fatal) occurred “in the area of 13th Street and T Street, NW” and “in the 1400 block of S St., NW.” Both shootings took place within a block or two of the start of the Pride parade, which “assembles on 15th Street NW” then “marches east on T Street, south on 14th Street.” The D.C. Pride parade follows a different route than many parades (e.g., the March for Life, which marches from the National Mall to the Supreme Court), beginning north of the White House in a neighborhood known forLGBT activities.

It’s even possible that the violence was not related to the World Pride festival at all. The police have not mentioned — and probably should not mention — whether any of the victims or suspects were associated with Pride festivities or, perhaps, with local street gangs. That same night, D.C. police responded to two other reported shootings to the south and east of the Anacostia River, which were more likely gang-related. Unfortunately, such violence is not unusual for a D.C. weekend, especially in the summer.

Nevertheless, an absence of official confirmation has not stopped many outlets from associating the violence — especially that which occurred near Dupont Circle during the Pride afterparty — with the attendees of World Pride. Partly this is due to the close association in time and place. But partly this may also be due to the fact that people who identify as LGBT (and especially as transgender) are statistically more likely to become violent radicals.

To cite just a few anecdotes, in March 2023, a transgender-identifying woman motivated by left-wing ideology committed a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tenn. In November 2022, a queer-identifying shooter committed a mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo. Most recently, 31 pro-LGBT activists were arrested in Seattle in May 2025 after assaulting police at two pro-family rallies.

The statistical correlation is no mere accident, for LGBT identity and a propensity for violence are linked by a common cause: both stem from a rejection of God’s design for humanity.

In Genesis 1:27, Moses records, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Christians appeal to this verse as an important basis for an objective sexual ethic, as Jesus himself did (Matthew 19:4). People are created male or female by God, which means this gendered identity is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). In combination with Genesis 2:24, this verse also forms the biblical basis for viewing marriage as a union of one man and one woman. By definition, alternative sexual orientations and alternative gender identities reject the implications of God’s creative work as set forth in this verse.

But Christians also appeal to Genesis 1:27 (along with verse 26) to ground another important doctrine, the inherent dignity and worth that every person possesses due to the simple fact that they bear the image of God. Among the manifold implications of this doctrine, the “image of God” in man becomes the stated reason for God’s prohibition on murder in Genesis 9:5-6.

Thus, in rejecting God’s design for gender and sexuality, LGBT ideologues must also jettison Scripture’s teaching about man’s inherent dignity. Having denied the authority of God and his word, LGBT ideology must render life intelligible by resorting to some other source of authority.

Unfortunately for adherents of this ideology, their options are few; since the natural world also testifies to God’s character (Romans 1:20), their unbelieving hearts must ultimately abandon the prospect of locating some objective standard of truth. Instead, LGBT ideology affirms a person’s internal feelings as the most reliable guide of what is true, good, and right for that person. If a person feels attracted to the same sex, or like they belong to another sex, these feelings are elevated above any appeal to Scripture, reason, objective moral truth, or religious tenet.

But this subjective standard has one enormous downside: feelings can contradict one another. In particular, one person’s feelings contradict the feelings of another person, leading to conflicting visions of emotively determined truth. By what standard can these differences be mediated?

As far as these feelings relate to sexual self-identity, this ideology proposes to resolve differences through tolerance — nay, eager acceptance — of every other person’s self-identity. But a person’s feelings are not confined to sexual identity alone. A variety of “passions at war within” them (James 4:1) can incite them to selfish entitlement, pride, envy, even hatred for others. Apart from an objective recognition of human dignity instilled by the doctrine that men are made in God’s image, these various passions can provoke fallen human beings to view others with contempt, and so treat them contemptibly.

In Paul’s famous logical progression, God answers the sinful unbelief of men by giving men over to commit more sin, including homosexual sin (Romans 1:26-27). This downward spiral concludes with the comprehensive indictment that men “were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice,” stretching even to murder (Romans 1:29).

Paul’s account shows how various forms of rebellion against God can overlap. If people reject what God has revealed about human sexuality, they will also reject what God has revealed about the value of human life.

Sadly, the law enforcement agency in our nation’s capital seems unaware of the moral stakes involved — or even their duty to protect human life. Despite the surrounding violence, the D.C. Metro Police Department — which adopted a rainbow-colored shield as its Twitter profile picture — celebrated “a successful WorldPride Parade.”

In its account of the DuPont Circle shooting, The Washington Post quoted a server working at a nearby restaurant. “I get really upset, because I think Pride should be really fun. I think everybody should be having fun and dancing and hugging and kissing each other and drinking responsibly,” Willis said. “Everybody was dancing, having a good time. And then, it wasn’t fun anymore.”

Sin is like that. It promises happiness that it can never deliver. LGBT revelers may live in a perpetual bacchanalia without ever finding true satisfaction. But no matter how much fun they have, or pretend to have, on Judgment Day, everyone who has rejected God will come to find out that their sin isn’t fun anymore.