But 'the absence of pride is not shame,' Jesse Bering concludes
(NEWSER) - It's LGBT Pride month, but research psychologist Jesse Bering is certainly not proud of the fact that he's gay. The way he sees it, "pride" can be defined in three main ways, and none matches the way he feels about his sexual orientation. Pride is sometimes defined as, according to the OED, "an excessively high opinion of one's own worth." That's not a good thing. In fact, it's so bad that to Christians, pride is one of the seven deadly sins. "Now, if embracing 'gay pride' were done simply for the slap-in-the-face-to-religion effect, I’d be all for it," he writes in Scientific American . But there are many gay Christians, and even gay atheists don't like that type of pride—so the definition doesn't fit. More»