The Rugby Football Union will fly the ‘Pride Progress’ flag at Twickenham this weekend, when a World XV team play the Barbarians invitational side.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the RFU’s decision is ‘in response to the selection of Israel Folau’ in the World XV. The 34-year-old Folau was a regular in the Australian team for a number of years before he was sacked in 2019 for airing his views on homosexuality. A devout Christian, Folau has subsequently represented Tonga, from where his family – and faith – originates.
Why do some bourgeois progressives appear incapable of respecting the beliefs of Christians and Muslims? It is 200 years since missionaries from the Wesleyan Methodist Mission landed in Tonga. According to the World Council of Churches, ‘after a difficult start the work progressed, and by the middle of the 19th century the whole population was Christianised’. The ‘difficulty’ arose from those Tongans who resented the arrival of hectoring white people ordering them to change their ways.
Folau isn’t an isolated case
Ultimately, however, Tonga was converted, as were Samoa and Fiji, two other South Pacific nations which today are home to some of the most committed Christians in the world. But there is now a new god in the West, a progressive one that appears to hold Christianity in contempt. So, with exquisite irony, Polynesians like Folau are being persecuted by pious middle-class people; the type of folk who, if they had lived 200 years ago, might well have bullied his ancestors into following Christ.
Folau isn’t an isolated case. Last July, seven players from an Australian rugby league team, the Manly Sea Eagles, declined to wear a Pride jersey for a match against the Sydney Roosters. The seven – of Tongan, Samoan and Nigerian descent – cited ‘cultural and religious’ reasons for their stance.
This unleashed a torrent of criticism from progressive types. The players were defended by their coach, Des Hasler, who admitted that the players hadn’t been consulted about the jersey. He sympathised with them, saying that their cultural and religious views ‘must always be considered’. A few weeks later, Hasler was sacked.
Justifying their decision to fly the Pride flag ahead of Sunday’s match, the RFU issued a statement in which they said they supported ‘everyone having the right to exist as their true selves, and of feeling connected and united through rugby’.
Steve Hansen, the former All Black coach who is in charge of the World XV, backed the Twickenham bosses. He said of the flag: ‘It is there is to support the people that are judged and treated poorly because of who they are…The big lesson there is just treat everyone with kindness and love.’
There is a similar cant running through football. Earlier this month, the French football league decided to mark the international day against homophobia, transphobia and biphobia by calling for players in Ligue 1 to wear rainbow-coloured numbers on their shirts.
Several refused, including the Toulouse and Morocco forward Zakaria Aboukhlal, and Mostafa Mohamed of Nantes and Egypt. ‘I respect all differences, I respect all beliefs and all convictions,’ said Mohamed by way of explanation. ‘This respect extends to others but also includes respect for my own personal beliefs. Given my roots, my culture, the importance of my beliefs and convictions, it was not possible for me to participate in this campaign. I hope that my decision will be respected.’
France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, expressed her fury with the dissidents for snubbing ‘this message of non-discrimination’. She demanded that the clubs sanction the players involved because ‘we are in a country that has always promoted respect for others and human rights. It is essential that we can all find ourselves in such a basic message of living together’.
Oudéa-Castéra’s declaration contradicted what she had said six months earlier during the football World Cup in Qatar. Several European nations, including England and Wales, wanted to take a stance against Qatar’s proscription of homosexuality by wearing Pride armbands. The French squad, however, made clear from the outset it would not follow suit, a decision defended by Oudéa-Castéra. ‘The important word…is freedom,’ she said. ‘Each player has his conscience, has his freedom, has his way of expressing himself and we must not impose a straitjacket, an attitude.’
There is a growing schism between the new religion of progressivism and the older, more established faiths. A poll in 2019, for instance, revealed that 63 per cent of French Muslims and 20 per cent of Catholics considered homosexuality a ‘perversion’, a figure that dropped to 10 per cent among those respondents who said that had no religion. A poll in Britain three years earlier found that 52 per cent of Muslims believed homosexuality should be illegal.
Conservative Anglican archbishops in Africa have expressed their opposition to the Church of England’s recent ruling to allow the blessing of same-sex marriages. Archbishop Stephen Samuel Kaziimba Mugalu of Uganda accused the C of E of having ‘departed from the Bible’, and in his view ‘that is wrong…God cannot bless what he calls sin’.
Today’s progressive missionaries parrot words such as inclusivity and kindness but they rarely extend compassion to those who aren’t of their parish. On the contrary, like all heretics, those who contradict them are scorned, insulted, threatened and, as was the case with Israel Folau, cast into the wilderness.
England No. 8 Billy Vunipola, also a Christian of Tongan extraction, escaped a similar fate for offering his support to Folau. He was issued with a formal warning by the RFU over a post in which he shared his view that ‘man was made for woman to pro create that was the goal no?’.
Progressives are on the whole viciously intolerant of people who don’t share their convictions, and therein lies the inconvenient truth of today’s new religion. One of their principal commandments is to ‘celebrate diversity’. Yet to do that authentically means accommodating the cultural beliefs and religious practices of diverse religions, as eloquently alluded to by Mostafa Mohamed. It’s a question of mutual respect. Instead, Christians and Muslims are discriminated against; and, like the missionaries of the 19th century, progressives demand that they kneel before a new god.
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