From the editor’s desk:
This “From the Editor’s Desk” could focus exclusively on pride month events – or “pride season” as the Liberal government calls it. Depending on where you live in this great country of ours, you could be exposed to pride day, pride week, or pride month (or all three) any time in June, July, August, and presumably September. Heritage Canada says June is Italian Heritage Month, Filipino Heritage Month, Portuguese Heritage Month, National Indigenous History Month, and “Launch of Pride Season.” Pride season? (Why does LGBTQ+ get to claim the four warmest months of the year?) Sometimes it seems all year is pride season, with one list I found noting April 26 (Lesbian Visibility Day), May 19 (Agender Pride Day), May 22 (Harvey Milk Day), July 14 (Non-Binary People’s Day), third week of July (Non-Binary Awareness Week), Nov. 13-19 (Transgender Awareness Week), Nov. 20 (Transgender Day of Remembrance), and Dec. 1 (World AIDS Day) as various LGBTQ+ celebrations, although I might be missing some. Anyway, I will try not to let pride commentary monopolize this page in the way that LGBTQ+ people monopolize the calendar.
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Julie Bindel in Compact Magazine: “Increasingly, sexual minorities are not only tolerated but objects of civic reverence. Across Great Britain and the United States, they are honored in around eighteen calendar days per year calling for awareness, visibility, remembrance, and Pride.”
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Prime Minister Mark Carney has jettisoned much of his predecessor Justin Trudeau’s social justice virtue-signaling, preferring to make announcements about economic issues rather than cultural ones. Still, he cannot escape the LGBTQ+’s stranglehold on progressive politicians. In his pride flag-raising speech on Parliament Hill, both the sign on his podium and his speech referenced (the never-ending) “pride season.” About one in 100 people are truly transgender (gender confused, rather than merely following a fashionable trend they deem somehow both perfectly normal and somewhat transgressive). About two or three in a hundred identify as homosexual. So, LGBTQ+ people are just four per cent of the population, but they lay claim to 25 to 33 per cent of the calendar year. As the kids on the internet say, make it make sense.
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It is not just Liberal politicians who bend the knee to the LGBTQ cult. The putatively conservative premiers of Ontario and Nova Scotia, Doug Ford and Tim Houston, both tweeted pride month observations. Ford’s greetings had a picture of himself and two cabinet ministers wearing the “progress” flag that includes not just the rainbow but a chevron featuring the light pink and blue colours of the transgender flag, and black, brown, and white to represent Black Lives Matter. There is nothing conservative about sporting the colours of left-wing movements. No wonder the New Blue Party keeps criticizing the Ford government as woke.
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Jonathan Kay tweeted about drag events held at schools and libraries: “While these events are obviously inappropriate, I don’t think kids are actually *harmed* by cross-dressing men reading books. Kids understand Halloween & the general idea of childish dress-up games. In the videos, kids often look bored/confused, while their giddy instagram moms are manically supportive. My objection to this stuff isn’t that it’s harmful—it’s not—but that it’s a cringey virtue-signaling exercise conducted for the benefit of educators & parents who want the world to know that they believe womanhood is a gaudy costume.”
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The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto tweeted on the second day of June: “SickKids raised the Pride flag today — but we had to lower it, just to raise it again. That’s because it flies here year-round.” It’s weird that the hospital feels it necessary to announce something they do daily. See the Jonathan Kay comment above about “a cringey virtue-signaling exercise.”
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Three San Francisco Giants baseball players were condemned for sporting Bible verses on their caps the gameday the team officially presented pride events at their stadium. The verse was Genesis 9: 12-16, noting that the rainbow was a sign of God’s covenant with humanity. Desecrating the pride colours is not allowed. (Police in both Surrey and Langley, B.C., are investigating the defacing of pride crosswalks in their cities.) Another player chose to wear his regular ball cap rather than one emblazoned in rainbow colours. Technically, the three violated Major League Baseball’s rules by adding to the official uniform, but the players’ Collective Agreement permitted Sam Hentges to opt out of wearing the pride outfit by wearing his regular cap. Sports journalists seemed almost unanimous in condemning the four for their silent protest against the imperious LGBTQ ideology. Some commentators said that politics had no place in sport. National Review’s Jim Geragty noted the left-wing commentariat (including sports writers) condemned the silent protest of these baseball players even though a decade ago they all praised former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaeperneck’s refusal to stand for the national anthem by taking a knee. A San Francisco Chronicle writer said the Giants players were “snowflakes” for not wearing pride caps, and that “in the name of Christianity, they took a decidedly un-Christian view of exclusion and judgement.” None of the players said anything directly about people sporting alternative sexual orientations or gender identities. Merely alluding to Christianity is enough to be criticized for being judgy and unchristian. Kaepernick won Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award in 2017 for his protest. I do not expect the Giants ballplayers to be feted for their silent protest.
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What occurs in the major leagues, does not stay in the major leagues. Minor league York Revolution, a Pennsylvania team in the Atlantic League, cancelled its June 18 game against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, saying that it would not take the field “out of respect for the Pride Community and the York community as a whole” because several players refused to wear a jersey with rainbow sleeves. The game is being treated like a rainout so it could be played later in the season.
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A World Cup game between Iran and Egypt, two Muslim countries, scheduled for June 26 in Seattle, was designated by local activists as a “Pride Match” in which gay activists encouraged fans to bring pride flags, signs, outfits, and banners. FIFA, the tournament’s organizer, has a rule against fans displaying any items that send a political message, but contradictorily, the organization also said that “general statements of human rights, including rainbow flags and other flags representing sexual orientation and gender identity are permitted under the FIFA World Cup 2026 Code of Conduct and may be displayed in stadiums.” FIFA ruled despite official protests by the football associations of Egypt and Iran that fans could bring pride accessories including flags if they were not used politically. Specifically targeting two countries where homosexuality is not only considered a sin but a crime seems the definition of political.
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Democratic California state senator Scott Weiner was chased out of the San Francisco annual trans march on June 26. Weiner self-identifies as gay, is outspokenly pro-transgender, and like many progressive Democrats hates Israel, calling the country’s actions in Gaza genocide and for Washington to stop giving aid to the Jewish nation. What does the latter have to do with the former? The problem for the left-wing trans crowd in San Francisco is that Weiner is Jewish and after the trans march, he was going to celebrate a “Pride Shabbat” dinner with a trans rabbi. That is, he was expressing his Jewishness not his anti-Israel bona fides. This led Dimitry Yakoushkin, a 49-year-old kaffiyeh-wearing sex-and-intimacy coach in gold hotpants to harass Weiner at the march. “How could you betray queers?” Yakoushkin yelled at the Jewish politician, with more than a few expletives added in. “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel” – which Weiner does not. The connection between Israel and queerdom is not exactly clear (to say nothing about Yakoushkin’s conflation of being Jewish and being Zionist). As Commentary’s Abe Greenwald noted, for the “queer Klan … their Jew-hatred has swallowed up all other activist concerns.” Indeed. Yakoushkin’s website describes him as “a Sexological Bodyworker … trained in the Hakomi Method” and while I have no idea what any of that means, what makes this whole episode absurd is that I doubt that the Sexological Bodyworker in hotpants would be welcome in Gaza, the land for which he is ostensibly fighting. Queers loving LGBQT-hating Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims) are a strange bedfellow indeed.
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Globe and Mail “health” columnist Andre Picard complained about Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance’s recommendation to indefinitely delay expanding euthanasia to those suffering solely from mental illness. Picard, who uses his platform to advocate for limitless euthanasia, said the committee’s report was a “spectacular example of the ‘can’t do’ spirit of our legislators.” What the legislators can’t do, to be fair, is permit vulnerable people with mental illness who might actually not qualify under the terms of legal euthanasia that their condition be “irremediable” to be permitted to be killed by Canadian doctors. (The report also accepted expert testimony that it was not possible for doctors to know the difference between a legitimate request for euthanasia and suicidality, which should be a vital consideration in knowing whether to proceed to kill a patient under MAiD.) Ignoring a ton of evidence provided by experts, Picard focuses on the activist Canadian Psychiatric Association which claims that “clinicians are ready.” To be clear, the CPA says (some of) their members are ready to okay killing patients. Note, if your psychiatrist is copacetic with killing you, you might not want him or her treating your mental illness. Picard implied the only people with mental illness who would access MAiD would be ones for whom “treatment has failed for three decades,” which is myopic at best and a boldface lie at worst. The experience with legal euthanasia in Canada is that it is not just the most tragic cases of long-suffering patients being killed. Picard said the government should ignore the report and Parliament and refer the matter to the Supreme Court because “justices, after all, actually make reasoned decisions” which “our politicians seem to struggle with mightily.” I would not typically quibble with the latter, but the former is patently untrue as both Rory Leishman and John Carpay have often reported in these pages. Picard, if he were honest, would admit that euthanasia activists, including himself, can rely on justices to be judicial activists and make decisions that politicians are quite correctly more reticent to make; the committee’s “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other” findings that Picard finds fault with is the precise reason why Canada should not proceed with killing the mentally ill: there is far from any consensus that killing patients is the correct “treatment” in any particular case.
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We have recently reported on the move to recognize human rights for nature, a bizarrely anti-human mentality that denies human exceptionalism by imbuing elements of nature such as rivers or animals with rights normally and correctly reserved solely for human beings. The latest insanity comes from Quebec. Last month, the small town Terrasse-Vaudreuil officially recognized the “rights” of trees, “including the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity, and to regeneration.” Of course, Quebec is the most pro-abortion province in Canada, but like the rest of Canada, preborn babies do not have the state-acknowledged rights to life, natural growth, integrity, and regeneration. Mayor Michel Bourdeau said that “a tree is like a human being … it breathes, it lives, it takes in water, it protects us from all sorts of things.” Does not an actual preborn baby also breath and live? Does not pregnancy provide many natural health benefits to the expecting mother, to say nothing of the child developing inside her? The town also signed the Universal Declaration of the Right of the Tree. (I’m not making that up, it’s actually a thing) which states, “the tree is a living being sensitive to changes in its environment” so “it must be respected as such” and “should not be reduced to a simple object” and thus “has rights for respect of its physical integrity.”) Article 3 of the Declaration states, “a tree must be respected throughout its life, with the right to develop.” Again, all these statements apply to preborn children. Actually, they apply even more to preborn children than to trees.
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