MEAN, really meanwhile in Canada

 Oh Canada!

From Spiked,

There is a tiny rural township in Ontario, Canada, just over the border from the US state of Minnesota, that glories in the name of Emo. Emo has a population of just 1,300, and until fairly recently was known (though not by many) for its picturesque waterfront park, its annual Rainy River Agricultural Fair and its catch-and-release fishing tournament, the Emo Walleye Classic. It looks idyllic, with simple straggles of wooden houses and vivid verdure bordering the enormous Clearwater Lake.

But no. It turns out that Emo is a false paradise, a hotbed of hate. All that sleepy angling and riparian tranquillity is a front. Prejudice and bigotry reign in the hearts of these simple townsfolk, for which they must be punished. Last month, the human-rights tribunal of Ontario ordered the town to pay $10,000 to an organisation called Borderland Pride, which brought a case against Emo for committing a supposedly terrible crime back in June 2020: the town council had refused to declare June 2020 as Pride Month. The horror!

The tribunal ruling also noted that Emo failed to fly an ‘LGBTQ2 rainbow flag’. The shame of it! (It turns out that Emo doesn’t actually have a flagpole to attach the sacred standard, or indeed a lesser pennant of any kind, but that’s by the by.)

And that’s not all. Town mayor Harold McQuaker made an apparently outrageous statement at a council meeting. He said: ‘There’s no flag being flown for the straight people.’ For this, he must personally stump up another $5,000. This was, the tribunal decided, a ‘demeaning and disparaging’ remark that ‘constituted discrimination’ under Ontario’s human-rights code. Mayor McQuaker and all his staff must now attend special human-rights training.

Borderland Pride, which describes itself as a ‘2SLGBTQIA+ Pride organisation’, has welcomed the decision. It has also magnanimously offered to refund a third of its award directly to the town library on the condition that the library hosts a drag-queen storytelling event ‘on a date of our choosing’. (That ‘2S’, by the way, stands for ‘two spirit’ – referring to a Native American belief in gender non-binariness that may not actually have ever been a thing, and that many actual native Americans have never heard of. It’s a bit like if gays in the UK demanded extra-special recognition for being wicker men.)

We joke about the ‘rainbow mafia’, but this behaviour is pretty close to actual mafia tactics. ‘Nice little town you got here. Very pretty. Don’t see any rainbow flags though… Would be a pity if anything were to happen to your town.’

We can see this also in the UK with the recent hoo-hah over rainbow armbands in football. Sam Morsy of Ipswich Town has refused to wear one, and Marc Guehi of Crystal Palace has added a religious slogan, ‘I ♥ ️ JESUS’, to his.

The arm bands are nominally there to tackle homophobia in football. This is obviously nonsense. Nobody’s prejudice against homosexuality is going to be altered in any way by the sight of a gaudy accessory. Football has been awash with rainbows for many years, and yet still there are apparently no gay top-flight footballers (which seems statistically unlikely, let’s face it).

What the rows about flags in Emo and laces in Ipswich make clear is that rainbow ubiquity is not about ‘tolerance’ or ‘acceptance’ or ‘inclusion’. It’s a demonstration of force, and a display of political power. The FA forbids political and / or religious slogans, so Guehi’s Jesus message may get him into hot water. But the rainbow doesn’t count as political, somehow, despite its association with hotly contested and contentious topics like transgenderism, which you may have noticed is a bit of a hot potato.

The transparently obvious rainbow threat goes like this:

‘Our political cause is so holy that it isn’t a political cause at all. It’s about “rights”, and just everyday niceness. So, to reject our cause is to reject niceness. And you wouldn’t want to be known as that kind of person, would you now?’

There have been certain hopeful signs of late – the Cass Review in the UK, the enthusiastic rejection of the Democrats’ gender madness in the US – and it’s tempting to think that LGBTQ+ rubbish might finally be drawing to an end. But the Emo and FA stories are a reminder of how deeply embedded the Pride ideology is in Western institutions. (An ideology that, it must be remembered, is now only tangentially related to homosexuality.)

Even if some of the bigger insanities may be on their way out, groups like Borderland Pride and Stonewall still have their dirty mitts all over civil society. It’s going to be a long haul, winkling them out street by street with (metaphorical) cold steel.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

Oh dear me Canada I meant.