Et tu, Brute?

On Sunday, The Washington Post ran an editorial by Allan Lengel, detailing “accusations of betrayal” in a small Michigan community known as Hamtramck, after the city council enacted a ban... prohibiting the display of Pride flags on city property.

Oh, was I absolutely tickled to read this. (For a couple of reasons, actually.) Everything about Pride flags on public property is a disgrace, so of course I welcome and applaud this civic act—but the real treat was in the minutiae, because I have a penchant for schadenfreude. Here’s a bit of backstory, from the article:

This city of 28,000 was once so Polish it was dubbed ‘Little Warsaw.’ But in recent decades, an influx of immigrants gave Hamtramck new character. Bengali and Arabic joined English on signs at City Hall. Yemeni and Bangladeshi mosques, restaurants and shops proliferated.

And last year, a Muslim who emigrated from Yemen as a teenager became mayor — the city’s first leader in nearly a century with no Polish roots — alongside what is believed to be the nation’s only all-Muslim city council.

According to Lengel, Hamtramck citizens saw this demographic shift as a good thing, priding themselves on a new trajectory, away from the backwardness of the flyover Midwest, and towards the great virtues of multiculturalism—or “intersectionality” one might say—and “progressiveness.”

But then, the ban came; and here is the delicacy, also from the article:

‘We welcomed you,’ former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. ‘We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?’

Isn’t it delicious?

Obviously, given what we know about the zealots of leftist progressivism (“Progs”) they’re not doing a whole lot of cogitating; ergo, they evidently didn’t really think about how their belief set in practice would unfold. What did they expect at the intersection of the LGBTQ++ movement and a culture known for extremely conservative relationship values? Not to imply that this Pride flag ban is an example of persecution as it really just comes down to civic decency, but I mean, come on! Islamic governments are known for their aggressive and violent persecution of the gay community (Iran and Chechnya come to mind). How thick does one have to be to be surprised that Muslims would ban the flying of a flag that represents a completely perverse sexual agenda?

People like Stackpoole dominate the progressive left, and they are the classic “doublethinkers,” recognized by their defining ability to maintain conflicting positions and beliefs simultaneously — “no uterus, no opinion” unless you’re “transgender” and then you can have a say, but only if you’re pro-abortion, otherwise you need to shut up and you’re a racist. (More apropos I suppose, is triplethinker.) We conservatives could have predicted this, but the lefties? Completely betrayed, and I have to admit, I love to see it.

Leftists view progressivism as a religion, so ultimately this is a clash of theology, but only one of these groups actually has concrete and principled convictions, and only one of these groups realized they were walking into the Colosseum for a fight to the death—spoiler alert, it wasn’t the Progs.

Aptly articulated by one X user:

The Democrat coalition is a bunch of groups that hate each other and whose long-term goals are mutually incompatible. Patronage/bribery is one main things besides mutual enemies holding this ramshackle alliance together. If the money runs out it will collapse fast.

Another sarcastically mused this:

Huh, you’d almost think that LGBTQ activists promoted Muslim immigration out of hatred for white Christians and not because they actually care about immigrants or something.

And, the best for last:

They thought ‘our diversity is our strength’ as their religious dogma trumped a group’s actual religious dogma.

Image: Public domain.