And I love it.
A Pride flag ban sparks accusations of betrayal in tiny Michigan city
HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — 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.
Many residents in this tiny enclave just north of downtown Detroit saw these changes as a sign of the Hamtramck’s progressiveness. The Muslim community that had previously experienced discrimination, including voter intimidation and resistance to mosques’ public call to prayer, had finally taken its seats at the table.
Yet the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that made Hamtramck something of a model is being put severely to the test. In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.
“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?”
All together now: WAAAAAAHHH!!! Nota bene this next part, y’all, it’s important.
The council’s unanimous vote in the middle of Pride Month seemed intentional to Stackpoole and others, though the resolution banned not only the rainbow flag but all flags except for the U.S., state, city and POW/MIA banners. Mayor Amer Ghalib, 43, defends the action as one of neutrality, saying no group should be able to promote a political agenda on city property.
Emphasis mine, in both excerpted sections, and entirely dispositive. So to translate from the WaPo shitlib-ese hysterics, then: This “ban” affects city-government buildings only, which is no more than appropriate; individuals remain perfectly free to fly any flag they like from their homes, places of business, and personal conveyances without falling afoul of this ban-that-isn’t-really-a-ban-at-all.
Ahh, but does it get even better, you ask? Why yes. Yes, it does.
Anyone who thought the controversy might soon go away was mistaken. The tension surfaced again in early September when the mayor and council balked at marching next to the Hamtramck Queer Alliance in the Labor Day parade.
“Basically, they wanted to destroy our image in front of our supporters by making us look like we were leading the queer group with all those flags flying behind us,” Ghalib said in a statement afterward. He’d managed to arrange a ride in a white SUV at the front of the parade, several spots removed from his concern.
The Labor Day Festival committee also issued a statement last week, saying the event was organized to celebrate “the diversity that makes Hamtramck unique. We are saddened to hear that Mayor Ghalib has expressed a complaint about being in the parade in proximity to a rainbow flag or a display of LGBTQ+ pride.”
As for Hansknecht, who walked in the parade holding the alliance’s bright yellow banner — “two square miles, for all of us,” it proclaimed — the incident only reinforced what he’d believed from the start.
The flag ban, he said, “has always been about being anti-queer rather than the neutrality they claimed.”
Aw, cry me a river, cupcake. I note that you DID carry your precious banner along the entire parade route without incident of any kind. I think it safe to assume that this hyper-sensitive bint was screaming the most offensive and confrontational epithets (s)he could come up with every last step of the way, too, at every innocuous spectator that looked the least bit like one of those goddamned cis-het Normie oppressors to shim/zhir.
Ghalib, with whom I enjoyed a very cordial email exchange on this topic back in June, was perfectly correct in his clear-eyed assertion that the freaks ’n’ geeks’ sole interest in demanding he march alongside the HQA was to humiliate him—to claim a victory for themselves and then rub his face all in it. Open-mindedness and tolerance is no longer enough for these miserable wretches, oh no; you will be forced to march in their parades, bake intentionally-offensive cakes for them, give your children over to them, and enthusiastically applaud them on demand. It’s like this:
Call it The Way Of The Leftist, maybe. I must say, though, that I am thoroughly enjoying the sudden implosion of the post-9/11 alliance-of-convenience betwixt American Progtards and mainstream Moslems, whose primordial “religion” puts them squarely at odds with every tenet of the shitlib catechism. I’ve long insisted such a schism was inevitable, and I was correct all along about that, too.
1
1
- Entries
