The diversity trap

If anyone reading this ever bought shares in the diversity racket, then I would suggest you start dumping them now. Not that I would blame you for having bought them in the first place. ‘Diversity’ has been the great mantra of our age. Like ‘equality’, it is one of those words set up to be impossible to oppose. What even is the opposite of diversity? Enforced sameness? Monotony? It is hard to say.

Nevertheless, everyone was encouraged to go along with the diversity racket. It didn’t matter who was in charge – Labour or the Conservatives. Diversity was said to be one of the defining virtues of Britain. Almost the aim of the place, in fact.

But as some of us pointed out way back, ‘diversity’ is not an unalloyed good. Not the least problem being the fact that diversity doesn’t even get along with itself. For years it has been the argument of the pro-diversity left that the more diversity you had, the more tolerance you would have – because diversity would somehow by its nature create more tolerance. But in fact not everybody in the diversity tent adores everyone else shoved in with them. The contradictions and tensions thrown up are legion.

 Take just one of the tensions thrown up during this ancient and most holy month of ‘Pride’. The mayor of Keighley, Mohammed Nazam, resigned this week after being criticised for attending a Pride event. Photographs show the then mayor grinning with a bunch of other numpties holding the hideous new ‘progress’ Pride flag, with added triangles to encompass trans people.

This year’s flag is said by campaigners to be ‘the most inclusive ever’. Not for Mr Nazam it wasn’t. You might be able to guess why from Mr Nazam’s first name. Wiser readers may also know that the man after whom Mr Nazam is named was not wildly pro-gay.

There are no Hadith (the sayings of Mohammed) explaining what the original Mohammed thought of ‘non-binary’ people, but one can guess. Mohammed was in many ways a fan of binaries. He would likely not have been a fan of the Pride flag in any of its forms. And while there are interesting scholarly arguments about the exact designs of the flags that Mohammed and his armies carried into battle, scholars are in agreement that Mohammed did not smite his enemies while flying a rainbow flag of any kind.

So the mayor of Keighley came under a certain amount of pressure from the Mohammed-fanbase community, and in a Facebook post said that he should not have taken part in the ceremony. In fact he said he should have ‘respectfully declined’ the invitation to the Pride flag-raising because it ‘contradicts my religious beliefs’. He went on to describe his attendance as a ‘lapse in judgment’.

This in turn led to him being suspended by the Conservative group on Bradford Council. For Mr Nazam is in several senses a conservative. He subsequently quit as mayor, but not before issuing a second apology, this time saying that he ‘did not mean any harm to the LGBTQ community’.

Interestingly enough, similar cases on the other side of the Atlantic aren’t all leading to the same outcome. In Alberta, Muslim and Christian parents have come together to oppose the teaching of LGBTQ ideology in Canadian schools. Last week hundreds of parents gathered outside the city hall in Calgary to chant ‘Leave our kids alone’. So-called Liberal counter-protestors also gathered. One wonders if there was any cognitive dissonance as these ‘diversity’ protestors found themselves standing in a Canadian street screaming at a bunch of Muslims? Reportedly there was in fact a split in the local activist ‘queer’ community on this question. Some believed that opposing the protestors would be a defence of ‘queer’ rights, others felt it would be ‘racist’.

In Los Angeles things got a bit more heated, with parents protesting outside the largely Armenian school. Here parents were also saying that they did not want their children ‘groomed’ by the LGBTQ ideology being pushed in their school. And on this occasion some of the pro-diversity counter-protestors ended up getting into fist-fights with the diverse parents. Once again you have to wonder if the LGBTQ activists who were pummelling immigrant parents to the ground are absolutely sure that their ideas have brought them to the optimal place in life.

In one of the most Muslim-populated area of the US, in Michigan, parents are continuing a fight to withdraw their children from lessons on anything to do with sexuality or family life, while in Maryland hundreds of campaigners came out again this week demanding to remove their children from such lessons. As one Muslim commentator put it, supporting these parents: ‘As Muslims, we refuse to be coerced into believing something our faith categorically condemns. This is not a political stance. It is a moral principle.’

All of which adds up to a very fine old mess, about which there are a number of things to say. The first is that it should by now be abundantly clear that every letter after B in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet has made the argument for gay rights infinitely harder. In the hands of a new generation of activists the ‘live and let live’ argument has turned into ‘believe what I believe’ and ‘say what I say’. Meanwhile, the old argument that gays were just like anyone else has been replaced by the suggestion that LGBTQIA+ people are in fact practically a different species – people who must have their own flag and be celebrated or else.

Second, it should now be abundantly clear where part of this began going really wrong – which is the moment that gender-nonsense activists chose to target the children. To tell children that there was no such thing as biological sex. To pretend that we are made of Lego and can take parts off and put them on again at will. To replace biological reality with gender woo-woo.

One poll in the US this week showed that support for gay relationships is declining. I’m not surprised. When the shoe was put on the LGBTQIA+ foot certain people decided to indulge in a bit of good old kicking, in the name of diversity. Well, they should expect to be kicked back.