Canadian mayor fined for LGBT thought crime of refusing to bend over
By: Rachel Marsden
Refusing to display the rainbow flag for Pride Month has cost the town and its head a combined $15,000 in penalties
The mayor of the Canadian township of Emo (pop: 1,204), which borders the US
state of Minnesota, has to personally pay an LGBTQ group $5,000 for injury to
their self-respect. And that’s on top of the $10,000 that the town has to fork
over.
According to official documents, the drama started in 2020 when Borderland
Pride, a Canadian non-profit group, requested that the town officials officially
recognize Pride Month in June of that year. The town had done so in previous
years, but reportedly decided to amend their proclamations policy – which had
yet to be adopted when this latest request came through. So the group’s request
was rejected in a 3-2 council vote that year.
It’s not like this particular policy amendment was high priority, particularly
at the height of the Covid fiasco, since they barely had any requests anyway.
This one group alone represented half of all of the town’s requests for
declarations, proclamations, or flag displays from April 2019 to April 2020.
Their request for the town to fly the rainbow flag for a week, and to send the
group photos of it with the town’s officials for use on social media, reportedly
wasn’t considered since the town didn’t even have a flagpole.
So here comes a complaint by the group to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal –
which was decided on November 20, 2024.
The role of such tribunals across Canada is to deal exclusively with
complaints about discrimination on the basis of prohibited factors like race,
religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and criminal
convictions. Because if actual courts had to deal with things like this, they’d
be clogged up like a frat house toilet after Frosh Week. If the complainant can
prove that there was at least a 50 percent chance of discrimination on one of
these bases, then it can order cash awards and other remedies. So step right up!
Take a spin! Win cash and prizes!
In the case of Borderland Pride against the Township of Emo, the tribunal
accepted at face value that the council didn’t consider hanging the flag because
of its lack of a flagpole. It did however note that the flag could have been
“displayed” somewhere else other than on a flagpole. But it stopped short of
ordering the mayor to walk around with it like a Superman cape.
The tribunal also accepted that two of the three council votes against issuing
the Pride Month proclamation occurred in good faith and were merely the result
of not wanting to adopt any proclamations before the new policy governing them
was put into place. It was only the mayor’s “no” vote that was problematic.
During the council meeting in question, after discussing what they should do
with the Pride flag display request in the absence of a flagpole, but before the
vote against the Pride Month proclamation, Mayor Harold McQuaker said, “There’s
no flag being flown for the other side of the coin…there’s no flags being flown
for the straight people.”
Uh oh, here’s comes the forbidden-thinking patrol!
The tribunal ruled that the mayor’s comment was “dismissive of Borderland
Pride’s flag request and demonstrated a lack of understanding of the importance
to Borderland Pride and other members of the LGBTQ2 community of the Pride flag”
and constitutes discrimination.
Suddenly, because of the mayor’s pro-heterosexual comments, it must mean that he
hates gays. So it’s decided that “on the preponderance of evidence,” the
rejection of the Pride proclamation was, more likely than not, the end-result of
the mayor’s homophobia, and couldn’t be because he aligned with the other two
Council “no” votes on the need for the policy amendment to deal with it first.
“I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “We just don’t have a flagpole at our town
hall,” McQuaker recently told the Toronto Sun. But cognitive deviance is
cognitive deviance, and like a colon polyp, best to nip it in the bud so there’s
zero risk of it ever potentially developing into systemic cancer.
So here come the experts to tell the tribunal about how malignant this mayor’s
thinking already is.
According to Dr. Emily Saewyc, an LGBTQ specialist who testified at the hearing,
research suggests that “anti-LGBTQ rhetoric by President Trump, Vice-President
Pence, and members of Trump’s cabinet during his presidency visibly increased
the amount of hate and violence” towards these minorities. Or, you know, maybe
people are just fed up with having special interest agenda shoved down their
throats in make-work projects for activists at a time when citizens of all
stripes are facing common and federating hardships. She then attempted to draw a
parallel with the “homophobic and hateful social media posts about Borderland
Pride and the LGBTQ2 community” after the vote – as though people would have
been cheering the LGBTQ cause had the mayor not been such a bigot and supported
Pride Month.
Right, because the key to people embracing wokeism is just to firehose even
more of it into the public domain. Guess she hasn’t heard about the impact on
brands like Bud Light and Jaguar after going woke. Or the public outcry after
the Paris Olympics opening ceremony featuring what many interpreted as being a
tranny wreck version of the Last Supper.
Borderland Pride wanted the tribunal to allow it to choose a week for the
Township to have 2020 Pride Month now, and to force it to hold Pride Month every
June going forward. It refused. But it did order Mayor McQuaker to attend a sort
of re-education camp. Within 30 days, he has to provide Borderland Pride with
proof that he’s completed the province’s human rights training course.
McQuaker has basically told the tribunal to shove it, refusing to pay or take
the course, calling it “extortion,” according to the Toronto Sun.
All of this is the sort of blueprint that demonstrates exactly how special
interest agendas end up hijacking the most basic aspects of daily life, through
relentless activist browbeating that has a chilling effect on anyone who fails
to passionately cater to their sacred cows.
COPYRIGHT 2024 RACHEL MARSDEN