Equating Pride flag to swastika ‘vile’ — and a headache for UCP
If anything will thwart UCP next election, it’s ‘vile’ remarks by the far-right fringe
Likening the Pride flag to a Nazi swastika is, indeed, “vile” as UCP Leader Jason Kenney tweeted about comments made by party member John Carpay. But such disgusting outbursts could be the one thing that keeps Kenney out of the premier’s office next spring.
“Vile” is a mild word for John Carpay’s linking of the swastika and the hammer and sickle with the rainbow flag of Gay Pride.
His comments at a Rebel gathering on Saturday were disgusting, demeaning and dangerous.
Referring to totalitarianism, he said: "We gotta think about the common characteristics. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the hammer and sickle for communism, or the swastika for Nazi Germany, or whether it’s a rainbow flag.
“The underlying thing is a hostility toward individual freedoms, the underlying thing is a vision where government is the master and government is forcibly guiding us toward this wonderful utopia, rather than allowing us to exercise our freedoms and raise our families and lead our own lives.”
Carpay talked about freedoms as if his own right to free speech is in some way impeded. We wish!
How is it “hostility toward individual freedoms” when LGBTQ kids are at last accorded some official respect and acceptance — when they are, in fact, granted individual freedom?
It’s really hard to imagine how gay kids are impeding John Carpay from raising his family or leading his own life.
Carpay is a lawyer, longtime right-wing zealot and occasional associate of UCP Leader Jason Kenney.
It was Kenny who called Carpay’s words “vile” in a tweet.
On Monday, Kenney was apparently still deciding if Carpay, a UCP member, should have his party card ripped up and ritually scattered over the legislature reflecting pool.
If anything keeps Kenney out of the premier’s office next spring, it’s going to be this loose coalition of zealots who are emboldened by Donald Trump and infuriated by the Alberta NDP’s efforts to secure decent protection for minorities.
Kenney comes, roughly, from their side of the conservative movement — the Reform party heirs of Alberta Social Credit.
In those days, a phone tip to local police would get any gay gathering raided and the foundins thrown in jail. That happened in Edmonton as recently as the 1980s.
Kenney’s job is to keep shoving the special-interest zealots off the UCP truck. It’s getting increasingly exhausting.
In a tweet Monday, Kenney said: “The gay rights movement has worked through legal, democratic means, often to overcome gross violations of basic freedoms by the state. To compare that in any way to genocidal totalitarianism is vile, particularly given the violent persecution of LGBT people under such regimes.”
That part I can heartily applaud. But in the next tweet, Kenney slid toward a hedge.
“I acknowledge that John Carpay apologized for his offensive remarks. But this tendency to trivialize the unique meaning of Nazi and Soviet terror must stop. Genocidal totalitarianism has no relationship to political disagreements in our liberal democracy.”
First, Carpay said in a statement he didn’t intend to “broadly equate the rainbow flag with the evils of Communism and Nazism.”
He apologized to anyone who thought that’s what he did — although it’s exactly what he did.
Protection of LGBTQ rights is also much more than a “political disagreement.”
Any attempt to limit those rights is not a subject for legitimate debate, any more than the rainbow flag is a swastika. It’s an assault on a minority that has been treated horribly for generations.
Carpay, it must be added, backs a legal challenge to Bill 24, which protects students from being outed if they join a gay-straight alliance at school.
But here’s the really thoughtless, foolish and insensitive thing about connecting the LGBTQ symbol to the flags of murderous regimes.
The jackboot march to real totalitarianism always starts by demonizing minorities. They are painted as social, political and even criminal dangers to the true identity of the majority.
Soon enough, the susceptible among the majority stop seeing individuals, and begin to see only menacing clusters of alien colours, customs and behaviours. We all know what can happen next.
To suggest that gays are somehow connected to that thinking, rather than eternally afflicted by it, is both wildly wrong and deeply hurtful.