Oh, no! The intersectional peasants are revolting and the left elite know just where to turn: to racism.
Normally when a group of Christians rebel against ribbon-bully forced “inclusion”, it’s a doddle for the left to decide who to side with: Christians contend with straight white males for the Intersectional Wooden Spoon.
But when the Christians are brown?
Suddenly, the left hand themselves a licence to gibber the sort of stuff that would have them denouncing anyone else as “racist”, “Nazi” and “fascist”. Just ask Clarence Thomas.
Or the Manly Seven.
The Manly Sea Eagles jersey controversy began as another one of those silly and unnecessary culture skirmishes that sports clubs get us into. But it has very rapidly become a major example of an expression of prejudice alive in our society today. Trouble is, the prejudice is the implicit and explicit condescending racism directed towards the seven players (six being Islanders and one of Nigerian and Indigenous Australian descent) who have refused to play in a “pride” jersey tonight.
Directed by…? C’mon, you can say it.
The “pride” and “rainbow” themes have been so overused, now largely in corporate settings, that their original assertive content has been lost. That was that the message was one not merely of social tolerance but also of radical equality. It was the proposition that all sexualities were to be equally welcomed and regarded as legitimate.
That’s not “radical equality”: it’s social tolerance. “Radical equality” is something much darker, and in fact, not at all equal. Like the pigs of Animal Farm, the radicals of “radical equality” have decided that some porkers are more equal than others. Any porking that involves a cut of rump, or lipstick on the pig, is the one that gets to crack the whip.
Of course, a Crikey (a publication whose readership is almost entirely confined to the ageing queens of Prahran and Paddington) writer isn’t going to have the guts to admit that the rainbow has become less a flag than a truncheon.
But at least Guy Rundle is able to see the condescension and bigotry lurking just beneath the surface of the rainbow left. A bigotry that cannot see brown people as anything but helpless children — and their often deep-rooted Christian faith as a sort of native pantomime, imposed on sunny, innocent brown minds by those wicked white Colonials.
In this iteration, the colonialist argument seems to have been resorted to early, mostly by those seemingly trying to defend it […] a more than usually simplistic “noble savage” account of pre-colonial life. Alas, poor corrupted boy-babies.
In “progressive” publication after publication, white leftists who almost certainly sneer routinely on social media about “racism” resorted to the most condescendingly racist “explanations” for the Manly players’ behaviour.
Bless the little children.
Can these people hear themselves? Why is it so impossible to simply admit that a group of people have a consistent and well-formed belief system, which has certain necessary moral consequences for them? The “colonialism” argument, trying to square the circle — dealing with people who don’t fit into the notion of a progressive coalition — fundamentally dehumanises the players themselves, reinscribing the very logic that powered colonialism in the first place.
To his credit, Rundle actually admits that the Intersectional Totem Pole is real.
There are several things going on here. The first is that there’s a hierarchy of oppression within progressivism, in which LGBTIQA+ is at the apex. If there’s a contradiction between two groups, the other must be constructed as an object, not a subject, to resolve any conflict of beliefs. They know not what they think.
The second is that constructing the seven players as brainwashed, backward or children means we don’t have to confront what their actual act was in resistance of. They have made no statement opposing tolerance or legality of same-sex acts; what they have explicitly rejected is the “pride” notion: that everyone should see all sexualities or identities as equally to be preferred.
This is getting closer to the nub of it. When John Howard famously said that he’d be “disappointed” but accepting if his children were homosexual, the left elite exploded in fury.
That is very confronting for some, not least because one suspects that many people still hold some form of that value, usually expressed in regards to their children — that they love them whatever, but would prefer they turned out straight, had babies, etc. Many people who voted yes in the plebiscite would hold that view, with varying degrees of intensity.
There is no reason to suppose that view has disappeared, or will any time soon, since it is bound up with family, continuity, and the way in which marriage and childbirth are the points at which nature meets culture, in any culture.
Crikey
Well, I mean: how dare they. How dare they believe in tradition or the shocking notion that the family, marriage and children are fundamental to a society.
Still, Rundle, dimly, grasps it: tolerance is not forcibly mouthing the platitudes of the ruling (rainbow left) class. It’s accepting that other people are allowed to agree to disagree.
Instead, as he admits, the “pride” banner has become a rallying-flag for totalitarianism. The very people who condemn 19th-century missionaries for replacing native culture with Christianity are now the 21st-century missionaries: stamping out Christianity by forced conversion to “diversity” that tolerates no diversion from its dogmas.
