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Hey Lily, QuAIA are not looking for government sponsorship. They, like many community groups, wish to march at Pride Toronto's parade (I'm starting to loathe that word).
Last I checked it was free or low cost for community groups to march at Pride Toronto, and a medium to large fee for corporations. There's a registration process, you then get your "rank" in the order of the parade, and told where the pre-parade line up is, timing on the day, bla bla.
Until recently, I'm assuming, there was no vetting of groups who want to march at Pride, excluding clearly homophobic and hateful groups. I assume. Pride Toronto, now a de-politicized organization in many ways, doesn't want to rock the boat with one of their funders. That much is clear. I will ask my unhelpful question of: so? The sign issue was retracted because of community response and reaction and demands.
FYI, folks from QuAIA have marched for the past few years. It's an issue now because of other things that have hit the fan in the past 6 months at the Toronto and Canadian level, which have been mentioned already.
Lily, since you are clearly a supporter of Israel, your opinion on this issue is biased, yes? Here on babble we lean in the other direction, that is in the direction of criticizing and denouncing those who practice apartheid and oppression against marginalized minority populations. This might not be the place for you.
Stargazer, don't call babblers names.
And, Canada practices apartheid. But that's drift.
agreed. Except that this is the LGBTQ section of the forum :)
There are a few too many here that believe that LGBTQ rights should be subsumed into a wider 'left wing' agenda, and that is fine. While I myself identify as left of centre/Progressive many of my fellow-travellers do not. I would suggest that those others who would tell us how we "should" celebrate, and those whose only interest in the LGBTQ community is to advance other issues that are not specific to that community, kindly be respectful of those who do not share those views. thankyou :)
Hi Maysie. No, I am not a supporter of Israel's policies towards its neighbours. Nothing I have said indicates I am, but yet a few have jumped to that conclusion, and I am not a fan of being on the defensive.
Those who have been bought can also be sold. In a nutshell the idea that Pride is strictly a LGB event went out the window when it started accepting money from the community at large. In fact, your new arguement rests entirely upon the presumed right of goverhment, which represents society at large and not just the LGB, to dictate what is and is not acceptable for LGB to say and do at the event. My view is that this interference by the larger heterosexual majority is entirely anti-thetical to the spirit of the Parade, and as I noted above undermines the essential principles that made the event meaningful to the entire community, above and beyond the direct support for LGB rights, is the theme of celebrating diversity and freedom of expression.
This is one of the important underlying themes of the event and one that is important in all contexts not just LGB community and this is partly what makes it worthy of government sponsorship from the community at large in the first place.
You want to have it both ways. You want to claim that it is LGB event, and that the LGB community solely has a voice in its organization theme, then argue, on the other hand, that it is appropriate for the government (representing for the largest part the heterosexexual majority) to dictate what LGB people may say and do at the event.
Lily, a final reminder that there would be no national and international pride celebrations at all, if not for ongoing political action by LGBTQ folks and allies. I'm tired of reminding you of the history and present of LGBTQ history.
Nobody is telling YOU how to celebrate Pride. QuAIA want to protest and be visible at Pride.
Do you remember the Glamourous Outcasts from about 8 years ago? A much more fabulous name, but their agenda was less clear. They were an anti-occupation group as well.
Hi, everyone. I'm conscious that I post here in the role of an ally only. And that I don't live in the fine City of Toronto.
Having said that, if anyone (regardless of sexual orientation) advocates excluding criticism of Israel from a Pride event because it is "divisive", I am not their ally.
If in the "Labour" forum, someone advocated excluding a picket-line contingent carrying placards saying "Gays and Lesbians for the strike", because it would be "divisive", I would not be their ally.
Now, if someone said, "I am for the exclusion of all corporate-funded floats from this march/parade/picket line", I would listen with much more sympathy, although I might disagree in the end.
But when someone says "exclude talk of Israeli apartheid", they become the enemies of freedom. Not one kind of freedom. Just freedom. It doesn't matter how they feel about Israeli apartheid. What matters is where they stand on freedom.
Elle Flanders (from QuAIA) vs Martin Gladstone (lobbyist threatening the withdrawal of funding to Pride Toronto): vimeo
Great Maysie! Thank you!
Near the end, Elle Flanders says that if QuAIA is banned, it will be thanks primarily to the efforts of Martin Gladstone. At 7:05 of the video, you'll hear Martin Gladstone pleading that he is not alone - and invoking the Ontario Legislature (i.e. its fascist motion against IAW) in support. This unprecedented act by the Ontario Legislature in blessing the suppression of democratic discussion - and the betrayal of Cheri DiNovo, for which she has never yet taken any responsibility - cannot be underestimated or forgotten.
Thanks for that. Martin Gladstone, I note, make specific mention of the motion which Cheri Dinovo voted for in the Ontario Legislature in support of his views.
ETA: Unionist I see already made this point.
You are absolutely right. Pull the funding; we will manage without.
That's the spirit!
Quote from the Pride Toronto website
Last year the city of Toronto collected $3.5 million in tax revenue from the economic activity created by Pride Week. That's a return on investment to the city of more than one thousand percent. I don't know how that rates in comparison to other cultural events but it seems pretty damn impressive. In my opinion if Pride Week stops living up to it's stated purpose due to interference from various "stakeholders" I'd be quite happy to see Pride Toronto wither and the prestige and economic benefit of hosting such an event go to a more deserving host.
Yeah, except there is this: The real movers and shakers behind the QAIA are LGB people. The real impetus behind the efforts to shut them out are the Bnai Brith and the CJC, neither of which qualify as organizations of LGB people. So, the idea that QAIA is "interfering" is hard to substantiate, since they are using an event dedicated to them to express their views, whereas the CJC and the Bnai Brith are outside organizations that are definitely interfering in the politics of the LGB community, from the outside. In fact, neither of them even bother to pay for floats at the event, even though they most certainly can afford too.
And again, how does defending the right of Gay and Lesbian Palestinians from being subjected to descrimination, occupation and martial law under Israeli Apartheid, fall outside of the mandate of celebrating "history, courage, diversity and future" of LGB people?
Cueball. I am totally gob-smacked by your post (#87). Perhaps if you were to adjust the focal length of your reading glasses from "all issues must be interpreted through the optic of the Israel/Palestine conflict" and recognize what forum you are actually in, you might see that my comments were directed towards those states who degarde, imprison and in many instances judicially murder members of the LGBT communities. Whether it is the Islamic theocrats in Iran or the born-again Christian thugs in Uganda, official comments coming out of Teheran or Kampala in support of the Palestinians do not excuse the human rights abuses against gays and lesbians in those jurisdictions. I at no point made any mention of "Islamic fundamentalism", and the examples of states I used who can broadly be described as pro-Palestinian (and who can also be identified as being pretty visciously homophobic) ranged widely - and while they did include both Muslim/non-Arab Iran and predominantly Muslim/Arab Sudan, they also included Uganda (predominantly Christian and non-Arab) and Jamaica (likewise predmoninantly Christian and non-Arab).
In particular response to the fifth paragraph of your very muddled posting, I do believe that if I search all the postings I have made since joining here, I have mentioned Hamas once... and that was in the context of questioning if there was any major distinction to be drawn between the tactics employed by the armed wing of Hamas and those employed by various Zionist armed groups against the British during the Mandate period -- I do not believe even the most befuddled would seriously suggest that I have confused them with the Taliban.
Further, I would suggest that you need to make greater efforts to acquaint yourself with the history of how the LGBT communities have fared in the Islamic world both in general, and specifically (or as you put it, regionally) and come up with a better example than Iraq. You will find that a revision of the criminal code in Turkey in the 1860s (roughly a century before this happened in either Canada or Iraq), sodomy was removed from the Ottoman criminal code... coincidentally this was about the same time that anti-sodomy laws were being "gifted" by the British empire to its various colonial "possessions" throughout the world... and we have all seen the legacy of that little gift.
If someone really needs to, as you put it "check their head", I think it is you Cueball. Your entire posting is myopic to the extreme, and does a disservice to the forum.
[ETA: the number of the post I am referring to was added in the first paragraph)
Perhap my confusion on your views had something to do with the fact that your response to FM was a total non-sequiter, where somehow you managed to infer that FM's post condoned any violations of anyone's rights anywhere, simply based on their position on the Palestinian cause:
No where did he allege that support for the Palestinian cause excuse violations of human rights violations anywhere. So here we have a statement applauding Israeli progress on this issue (with a caveat), then a statement about how "that a country's support for the Palestinian people does nothing to excuse the groteque oppression" and I am not supposed to assume that the body of your presentation about the "groteque oppression" is not directed at the tradional supporters of the Palestinian cause, which by and large are Arab and Muslim countries?
This view is thematic and common, and indeed Hamas was mentioned (not by you) directly up thread in this context.
Coming from there, the general thrust was that whatever we might say about the Palestinian cause, the "flip side" is that this does not excuse human rights violations by Palestinians against their own LGB community. Of course it does not. But within that statement there does not seem to be any detailing of the specific conditions of "statelessness" and the impact that has on the evolution of any cause of human "rights", as expressed by LGBT Palestinians themselves, and this is the main point of the latter half of what I was saying.
My experience has been that (1) the number of political groups participating in Pride dwindles ever year, so the risk of a "loss of focus" is not genuine; (2) for many people, expressing themselves politically, within and outside the narrow box of LGBT identities, is a source of Pride in itself; (3) I have to agree with those who are pointing out that while QuAIA originates wholly within the queer community (and a significant part of the Jewish queer community), many of those who are using their powers to influence the situation are from outside the LGBT communities.
Well Cueball, the best way I can think of not making such false assumptions is to stop incorporating the stereotypes you decry into your own worldview and then attributing to them to others.
It might also help to pay attention to what is actually written, like my apology to FM for being "selective" in what I was quoting (something you conveniently edited out in your post [#87] without indicating that you had done so), my pointing out that claims about the existence of "gay rights" within Israel are debateable (also conveniently edited out, again without any indication that you did so) and my assertion that the point FM was making was "[...] the crux of the matter [...]" (gee, big surprise, also edited out and no indication that the quote had been massaged).
While I realize that reproducing the parts of my post [#82] that were written with the intention of lauding FM's clear identification and explanation/description of the tactic being employed by critics of QuAIA's participation in Pride (as an attempt to divide pro-human rights activists) would have gotten in the way of your knee-jerk rant, it would have been (oh how shall I phrase this?) less disingenuous.
For my failure to insert a paragraph break between my sentence questioning the assertion that Israel is somehow a paragon when it comes to the question of gay rights and my point about being critical of homophobic state actors elsewhere in the world I am truly sorry. Allow me to go flagellate myself immediately.
Obviously my point about cheerleading for state actors is lost on you.
There was nothing disingenuous in my statement. I certainly don't deny that your statement about Israel is reserved, and might not qualify as applause, and then again, please see here that you are arguing that I am using it to my advantage, but in my original post "conveniently" editing it out.
The reason that I included it in the second instance was to give the quote in its proper context for the sake of accuracy. The reason that it was edited out in the first place was because it did not seem relevant to the main issue I was addressing, which is that the conditions in the countries that support the Palestinian cause in no way impugn the Palestinian cause.
Whether you meant to make this association with the Muslim and Arab world at large and grave human rights abuses by some of those nations that are the traditional supporters of the Palestinian cause, or not, is still not clear to me. However, it seemed very much to me that your statement fell into the category of some very traditional tropes about Arabs and Muslims, which are current now, and often used to impugn the Palestinian cause. Perhaps this was unintentional, or I didn't properly get your meaning.
And again, I do not at all regret having the opportunity to reference material from Palestinian Gay rights activists, outlining for themselves how the occupation, and all that entails negatively impacts their own struggle within their own communities.
In anycase, probably that is already too much of me in this forum, so I will let you have the last word, or not as you like.
That can be solved by having everyone in CJC wear "Nobody knows I'm gay" t-shirts. Of course, then Rabbi Bulka will go though the building and try to "cure" everyone.
Closing on a high-ish note. Please start a part two if anyone would like to continue.