The Small Overton Window on Political Slogans

On Display in the Toronto Star (Again)

Photo by Mario Azzi on Unsplash

By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher and Education Commentator)

In an opinion piece published July 15th the Toronto Star continues its tradition of shaming those who do not align with the far left views espoused by its editorial board and the activists who have captured most of our institutions. It is not hard to see why this practice has spread to our schools. 

The author of the piece takes issue with federal Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre getting his picture taken with someone wearing a “Straight Pride” T-shirt. In my view, the only thing Poilievre has done wrong is making the unlikely assertion that he was unaware of the message on the T-shirt. If true, that would surely be a case of poor judgment. It is not hard to imagine slogans a politician would not want to be associated with, and politicians should be cautious about such things. But “straight pride” surely seems pretty innocuous, in the league of “all lives matter”.

Nevertheless, the author of the article was triggered in a big way, calling it a “highly offensive” and “an overtly homophobic message”. I’m straight and my first reaction personally was to find the slogan silly. But then, I used to find the slogan “gay pride” silly too, until I thought about it and realized that being gay was, at the inception of the gay rights movement at least, generally considered something to be ashamed of. So proclaiming “gay pride” was a kind of antidote to that. It certainly never occurred to me that “gay pride” was an overtly heterophobic message! 

But then I thought about it a bit more and came to the conclusion that, these days, being straight places a person in a position of suspicion, just as being a man, or white, does. Straight people, especially white males, are suspected of being bigots, and thus expected to acknowledge their “privilege” and outwardly embrace “racialized”, Indigenous, and LGBT etc. people at every opportunity. Expressing pride in your identity is a major faux pas. But maybe for T-shirt guy, it’s an antidote as well.

Is T-shirt guy a bigot? Maybe. To know, I would have to have a conversation with him. But I am not prepared to assume that based on a T-shirt slogan, the same way I would not assume a person with a BLM T-shirt is a bigot, even though I know for a fact that a lot of BLM supporters are bigots. Some have a major hate on for white people (and any non-white person who does not share their postmodern, race essentialist way of thinking). But many BLM supporters have only the best of intentions. They want to fight injustice. They are just unaware that BLM, the organization, is totally corrupt, and barking up the wrong tree (causing far more harm than good) when it comes to improving people’s lives, because most black people are killed by other blacks, not white people. This is the case within most racial groups, unsurprising because 80% of murder victims knew their killer. 

There is no indication that T-shirt guy said or did anything to demonstrate bigotry, such as, for example, proclaiming intolerance of, or hatred towards LGBT etc. people. If he had, and Poilievre had not opposed him, then people would be right to cast the Conservative leader as “flirt[ing] with bigots in order to signal to the wider bigot community that they have a friend in his party”. As it stands, it simply appears that Poilievre is willing to talk to someone who expresses a view which is currently outside the boundary of what is considered acceptable discourse by the Toronto Star. Good for him! 

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Fluff Piece from Torstar Media Corp

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