Demise of Edmonton Pride

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Coming soon to a Pride march near you!

>>Global News has obtained a copy of an email sent out by the Edmonton Pride Festival Society explaining why the 2019 edition of the annual event, which aims to educate people and create a spirit of unity by celebrating gender and sexual diversity, has been called off. …
The society was presented with a list of seven demands including ending the Pride Parade and providing annual funding for Shades of Color and RaricaNow. …
“So no floats, no corporate, just community groups and it would be a protest march instead, and then they asked for each group to receive $20,000 a year in funding from us.”…
The Pride Society’s decision not to act on a call to ban police and military officers from taking part in the festival boiled over during the Pride Parade last summer.
The parade was stalled for about a half-hour when demonstrators blocked the route to demand that police, RCMP and military members be banned from marching in future parades.<<

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Pete and Pence

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Where has the love gone?

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Different View on ‘Mayor Pete’

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Why Democratic Party thought leaders and the media elite are embracing him, and why they moved quickly to tamp down the left-progressives that didn’t find him sufficiently intersectional.

More.

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Progressive Ponder If Being Gay Makes Pete Buttigieg Sufficiently Intersectional

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I disagree with Mayor Pete on a number of policy issues, but it’s interesting to see the left struggle with whether his being gay is enough to make up for still being a white male, or to raise the issue of whether he is gay enough.

(The original tweet that Guy Benson and others in the thread were taking issue with has now been removed by the poster.)

More.

The left is clearly of two minds on this, or maybe it’s liberals vs. progressives. Frank Bruni writes in the New York Times:

“The author is asserting that Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., doesn’t come across as particularly gay, meaning . . . what? That he lacks stereotypical mannerisms? That his voice isn’t high-pitched? I’m kind of floored, because I and other gay people around my age (54) or older spent most of our lives educating people about the bigotry and inaccuracy of those very stereotypes and trumpeting the message — the truth! — that gay people can be every bit as buttoned-down and strait-laced as, well, Pete Buttigieg! Now his divergence from those stereotypes is deemed remarkable and in need of dissection? Strange days indeed.”

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What Privilege Looks Like

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Jussie Smollett, the most privileged man in America.

Which was the point.

And this:

As for WHY they were dropped — you’ll recall State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recused herself from the case. She reportedly had asked cops to stand down at the behest of Tina Tchen — Michelle Obama’s former Chief of Staff and a friend of Jussie’s family.

With friends in high places Smollett again proclaims he’s innocent despite the grand jury indictments on 16 felony counts that will now go unprosecuted.

And isn’t it racist for Rahm Emanuel to call the Attorney’s Office dropping all charges “a whitewash of justice”?

More. Maybe GLAAD will honor him. After all, as previously noted:

GLAAD, Feb. 14:

“Jussie Smollett was victimized first in a hate-motivated and violent attack in Chicago and has since been doubly victimized as the subject of speculation by the media industry and broader culture,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, said in a statement. … “GLAAD joined with Color of Change to condemn the racism and homophobia that fueled the physical violence against Jussie and today we double down on that stance, while also calling out a culture where LGBTQ people of color are too often the last to be believed.”

As National Review sums it up:
Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff calls up the state’s attorney, the state’s attorney hands off the case to her assistant, and the assistant gives Smollett the deal of the century. And all of this is so egregiously, transparently corrupt that mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is spitting hot fire over this, as is Obama’s former chief strategist David Axelrod.

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Mission Creep

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The Human Rights Campaign is promoting legislation requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to employees. HRC, in doing so, takes note that some employees without paid sick leave are LGBTQ.

The issue with HRC pursing a broadly progressive agenda is that when it fundraises among Republicans, it presents itself as a group focused on LGBTQ-rights advocacy. Yes, the Log Cabin Republicans support a broadly conservative GOP-driven agenda. They’ve got the name “Republican” upfront, and their mission is as much about lobbying support for Republicans as it is about lobbying Republican support for LGBTQ legal equality. The same was true, in reverse, with the now-defunct Stonewall Democrats.

But HRC was founded with a nonpartisan mission and for many years held to that in its congressional endorsements and fundraising (before it started supporting presidential candidates). If that had remained true, the Stonewall Democrats wouldn’t have been rendered redundant, and HRC would not have turned into an adjunct of the Democratic party.

More. From Equality California:

“Enacting gun safety reforms [sic] at the federal level is a top priority for Equality California. LGBTQ people and our allies are often the targets of bias-motivated gun violence.”

And since no LGBTQ people or allies use guns to defend themselves from hate crimes, no problem there.

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They’re for ‘Free Speech’ Unless They Don’t Like It

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The Advocate reports:

“Following an online outcry and protest threats, New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center canceled an event — billed as the #WalkAway LGBT Town Hall — that was to feature controversial queer conservatives and encourage LGBTQ people to “walk away” from the Democratic Party.”

The Center issued this Orwellian statement:

“We strongly oppose censorship and fully stand by our commitment to free speech, but as our space use policy states, we reserve the right to cancel any event that promotes discriminatory speech or bigotry; negatively impacts other groups or individuals that use The Center; or conflicts with, or interferes with, Center-sponsored or produced programming. It has become clear that this event would violate all of these important policies.”

So, the Center won’t allow a conservative LGBTQ group to use its space because they oppose the agenda of LGBTQ Democratic groups. But those groups routinely rip into LGBTQ Rebpuplicans and conservatives, and that’s just fine.

As instapundit Glenn Reynolds likes to say, if it weren’t for their double standards, progressives would have no standards at all.

More. Over the years, the Center has received considerable funding from both New York City and State taxpayers.

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The Equality Act Targets Service Providers

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Moreover:

“And while the Equality Act doesn’t alter the exceptions in the Civil Rights Act for religious organizations, it specifically notes that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 cannot be invoked as a defense for discriminating under these laws.”

In other words, courts can consider the “discrimination” of a LGBT activist being told “Sorry, I don’t want to decorate a cake with a same-sex couple because it’s against my religion but they’d be happy to bake you one next store,” but won’t be able to consider the religious freedom rights of the service provider with regard to the protections provided under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

RFRA requires that the authorities meet the high standard of showing that the government has a compelling interest to justify infringing on religious freedom when enforcing federal law. If stripping defendants of RFRA protections in these cases wasn’t a big deal—that is, if it were obvious that compelling service providers to craft messages in support of same-sex marriage or gender transitions clearly trumped any rights to religious protection—why would progressives be insisting on a RFRA exclusion?

More. In the comments to an earlier post, reader “Sebastian” wrote a response to the argument that conservative Christians have had a long record of working to deny LGBTQ people their legal rights, replying that:

Your identity is so bound up with being “the victim” that you’re unable to see that, in this situation, you’re now the oppressor. It reminds me of the communists who were persecuted and then took power and persecuted those who were of the class that had persecuted them. They couldn’t see that they were now the oppressor — they had no mental picture in which it was conceivable to them that good communists, who had been targeted and persecuted all of their adult lives, could now be the oppressor.

I think that’s spot on. When I hear the argument that we must force bakers to craft same-sex wedding cakes in order to “stop their hate”—as, for instance, a recent episode of Will & Grace reiterated the “need to struggle” against the “haters” who won’t bake same-sex cakes—it seems clear that LGBTQ activists (and those who go to court to force religious conservatives to craft supportive messages are by definition “activists”) have no mental template in which it’s possible to consider that they themselves have become the persecutors.

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