It should be considered a violation of “unsteady and precarious” civil society that the ugliest flag in the United States is as popular as it is. I’m speaking, of course, of the Illinois state flag. As hideous as the state it represents, the flag’s belching turkey-eagle should be retired and Chicago sold for scrap (Jeff Blehar brought this upon himself).

The second-most-hideous ensign, the so-called Pride flag, deserves more consideration because of its actively chimeric nature. The multivarious sexual and racial political interests represented in its horizontal bar and leftward-marching chevron were recently unveiled at a NASA outpost in California. It’s the slippery slope playing out before our eyes, with the previous year’s model — no longer inclusive enough — moldering in a central California dump; a new symbol was affixed to the standard: a circle representing intersex individuals (those born with a combination of male and female genitalia).

Finally! The project of sexual revolution, 70 years in the making, has reached the zenith of inclusivity. When the flag was raised, men wept in the aisles and before the computer terminals, just as their forebears had done when astronauts first strode across the moon. That a taxpayer-supported entity would focus its finite resources on signaling not just into deep space but into our hearts and minds is a marvel of modern science.

Everyone, no matter what resides in any individual’s trousers, can gaze upon the vexillological, scatological brilliance that is the Pride flag in its final form and say, “I am seen (even if I need binoculars to see which stripe or structure represents my reproductive and racial predilections in this 3×5 quadrangle of nyan-cat-produced accelerant).”

Some hard-hearted conservatives, such as Rich Lowry, have suggested that this intersexed Pride flag is fleeting and that many more will follow it, which will make us pine for the days of only forty flaccidly flapping identities. I don’t know how he could say such a thing, given how little proof exists that the LGBT movement has the least bit of interest in incremental power capture. Absurd.

Ope, a research assistant just stopped by the desk and said that incremental power capture and reinterpretation of laws in favor of increasingly ridiculous identities is precisely what is happening.

Nuts.