Barbara Kay: At Pride Toronto, militant feminist dogma trumped rights
By Barbara Kay
The blow fell too late for a counter-punch. But that seems to have been the idea behind Pride Toronto’s arbitrary ejection of the Canadian Association of Equality (CAFÉ) from Sunday’s parade just days beforehand, leaving no time for appeal of the decision.
The annual Pride event in Canada’s biggest city is supposed to be a celebration of all things and causes relating to gay culture and, more broadly, to formerly marginalized sexual identities. It’s supposed to be a big tent. But as the treatment of CAFÉ shows us, only those groups with a politically correct agenda are seen as acceptable.
According to its own policy, Pride Toronto doesn’t permit cancellations after June 21 — thereby ensuring that groups have an opportunity to respond to complaints lodged against them. CAFÉ, which has charity status (giving them more legal standing than most of the other participating groups), took part last year without incident and had two months ago successfully registered to walk this year, their name appearing in official Pride literature.
CAFÉ was given no substantive reason for the rejection, just a note from the Pride organizers: “It has come to our attention that the work of your organization may contravene the spirit of the mission, vision, and values of Pride Toronto and WorldPride.” And that was it. Their right to march was withdrawn. At a stroke, CAFÉ was lumped in with pedophilia-promoting groups such as Men Loving Boys Loving Men, the only other type of group I could find to have been spurned by Pride as inconsistent with its mission.
Pride is supposed to be a big-tent event. But as the treatment of a men’s-rights group shows, left-wing activists have a veto on who gets to march
Although CAFÉ’s broad mandate is freedom of speech, much of its activity has focused on raising awareness of men’s issues — including those that affect, say, the right of gay men (and all men) to have equal parenting rights under Canadian law. But feminists regard any such advocacy as a threat to their dogma. And so feminist activism, occasionally aggressive, has attended almost every men’s rights speaker sponsored by CAFÉ on Canadian university campuses. (I was one such speaker two years ago.) It therefore isn’t much of a stretch to infer that CAFÉ was booted from Pride because of the complaints of militant feminists.
Read the rest of the article at: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/06/30/barbara-kay-at-pride-toronto-militant-feminist-dogma-trumped-rights/
There are plenty of reasons for Pride to reject CAFE. The group has hosted for the hate group, AVFM, and they actively lie about their status as a men’s rights group to apply for charity status and to the venues where they plan to hold events.
CAFE doesn’t support equality. They are misogynists and there is good reason for their exclusion from Pride Toronto.
Xodima,
It appears that you know nothing about the fair minded people who run CAFE, which is a group committed to equitable and fair treatment, a legitimate group rightly concerned with issues adversely impacting men as well as women. They are in no way misogynists and to label them as such is disingenuous or ignorant, or both. If the PRIDE parade promotes and embraces equitable treatment and fairness, it apparently does so with snobbery.
Why would anyone be proud of a sexual defect?