Over the weekend, Joe Biden ordered the new “pride flag” flown at the White House, flanked by two U.S. flag. Given that today is Flag Day, that seems a pertinent insult. Elle Purnell explains why it’s not just an insult but that the two flags cannot stand together.

For the first time since the British raised the Union colors over a burning Washington in 1814, the White House sits under a foreign battle flag.

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden relegated the Stars and Stripes to flank another banner, hung in the center of the presidential mansion’s South Portico. The so-called “progress pride” flag — the new, extra-garish version of the LGBT rainbow flag that features pink and blue “transgender” stripes as well as black and brown stripes representing racial identities — demanded allegiance from its central position at the White House.

There’s nothing new about federal bureaucrats pushing their cultural agenda on the American people. But the jarring visual from Saturday reminds us there’s only room for one flag at the top of a flagpole. Man cannot serve two masters; countries cannot unite under two flags.

She notes the common observation that the pride flag represents the new state religion, under which every American knee is supposed to bow. As far as our nation goes, she says:

The colorful flag hoisted over the White House represents a militant ideology that is utterly incompatible with the beliefs for which the American flag has traditionally stood.

She calls the “progress pride” flag an “emblem of self-indulgence. One that encourages people to indulge all manner of depravity, while somehow lumping people who make odd sexual decisions together with people with darker skin color as supposed "allies.” By contrast, the U.S. flag is an “emblem of self-governance.”

However, if you believe that freedom has a more profound purpose and that America has ever stood for anything more than personal gratification, then you feel the discordance between the flag flying front and center at the White House and the flag flanking it. There are legitimate arguments to be made about whether the American experiment, relying as it did on a sinful populace to be noble, was ever sustainable — but at the heart of the founding was a vastly different understanding of liberty than what is now paraded as the same virtue. …

Governance, of course, necessitates wisdom and discipline. Self-governance, by definition, entails responsibilities. The crucial disconnect between the two flags is that one represents self-indulgence and the other represents self-governance; the two cannot peacefully coexist.

Why? Because at the root of successful self-governance is, as Deneen says, “the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires” — in other words, to conquer self-indulgence.

She concludes:

If we hope to preserve — or rather, regain — our self-governance, we have no choice but to eschew the new state-enforced ethos of self-indulgence. A man cannot be ruled by both, and neither can a country.

Read the whole thing here.