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Multiculturalism Uber Alles
Last week Courtney Wright, 12, was sent home from a UK school celebrating the student body cultural diversity because she chose to celebrate her own – Britain’s – history and traditions.
The girl was chastised for wearing a Union Jack outfit although Bilton School in Rugby urged students to wear “traditional cultural dress” instead of school uniforms. She also penned a speech expressing her pride in British culture. For this she was sent home from school.
Wright’s father wrote on social media,
This is the reality of “cultural diversity”: every culture is celebrated and immune to criticism except for Western civilization, which is excluded from the Left’s cherished “inclusiveness” because the West is deemed a uniquely evil force for oppression, colonialization, and exploitation.
Below is the speech Courtney prepared, which is ironically more inclusive than the school authorities:
Former Labour MP Bill Rammell responded to the controversy: “We ought to be recognizing British culture, we ought to be celebrating it, and we ought to be celebrating the values that exist within it, that they’re a given that everyone here should sign up to.”
The culture cancellation backfired, as the media backlash forced a groveling apology from the Bilton School and Courtney Wright has since made media appearances in which she was allowed to read her speech. But the incident is yet another example of the capture of every British institution by the anti-Western, multiculturalist elites of the radical Left.
Demonizing the Religious Right
Tamás Orbán at The European Conservative writes that the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), a network of Members of Parliament who are committed to protecting the right of women to murder their own unborn children out of expediency, recently launched a report titled “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism is Regaining Power.” As you might guess from the title, it is a fear-mongering document that claims to expose “a new alliance of religious extremists, far-right populists, and oligarchic funders” in Europe whose purported goal is to “dismantle decades of hard-won sexual and reproductive rights across Europe” and “launder religious extremism into mainstream governance.”
As Orbán notes, the “politically charged dossier” reads “like a counter-terrorist threat assessment, and explicitly paints religious advocacy groups as part of an organized extremist threat that needs to be stopped at all costs.”
It will come as no surprise to anyone that the EPF’s own oligarchic funders include such New World Order globalists as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Who are these religious extremists? The Catholic Church; Catholic pro-family advocates like Civitas Christiana in the Netherlands or Human Life International, which is present in multiple countries; the conservative think tank MCC Brussels; New Direction, founded by Margaret Thatcher; and The European Conservative website itself, which “routinely promotes anti-gender narratives framed as efforts to safeguard national heritage and Christian values.” Horrors!
A representative of the global human rights advocacy group ADF International told Orbán,
When mainstream positions on family, gender, or parental rights are treated as threats to EU values, we move dangerously close to Soviet-era ideological policing, something that becomes more real with every free speech debacle in Europe.
Orbán concludes that EPF and other similar organizations smear “religious right-wing extremism” when in fact “their only goal is to weaponize the institutional power of Brussels to crush any opposition to their liberal agenda.”
Subverting Superman
The new Superman franchise reboot is now in theaters, and as I wrote last week, director James Gunn has declared that the all-American hero is a pro-immigration symbol, and to those who don’t like that politically-charged, progressive interpretation, Gunn said “screw them.” Now Breitbart News reports that self-identified lesbian writer Mey Rude has penned a piece for the gay magazine Out claiming that Superman is not just an “immigrant” but “also a gay icon” and “always has been.”
Superman’s alter-ego Clark Kent mirrors the sort of “double life” that closeted gays lead, Rude claims. She also insists that “being an outsider” and the “hypermasculinity” of the character also suggest gay subtexts (since when did “hypermasculinity” come to imply “homosexual”?). Not to mention Superman’s uniform – “Spandex, a bright cape, and the underwear on the outside” – which Rude says is no different from “an outfit you’d see at any Pride festival.”
Actually, any underwear at all would be a welcome relief from the explicit outfits you see at Pride festivals, but in any case, Superman’s Jewish creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel had no intention in 1934, of course, of imparting a homosexual subtext to the character, or creating an allegory about immigration. As Breitbart’s Warner Todd Huston observes, Superman
has never necessarily been portrayed as an “immigrant” per se. In the comics, the character has always identified himself more as a citizen of earth — and in past years, a citizen of the United States. After all, he left his alien home planet as an infant, grew up in Smallville in the U.S.A., and only knew about his home from the computer files his parents sent with him to earth. He has far more affinity for humans than for Kryptonians.
But because the alphabet movement loves to appropriate certain American icons and traditions in order to “queer” them, Out insists that
[n]o matter how much conservatives complain, Superman’s story is an immigrant story, and it is a queer story. Queer people have always seen themselves in superheroes, and will continue to do so. If conservatives want heroes that don’t represent the queer community, they need to look elsewhere.
“Queer” people can see whatever they like in Superman, but if they want to claim him exclusively as their own and impose a culturally subversive meaning that was never intended, then they’re the ones who need to look elsewhere.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior