The Liberals Make Me Want to Celebrate Straight Pride

And I'm a huge homo

Like any other politician, Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre takes hundreds of photos with people at every event he attends. About a year ago, he happened to take a picture with a man wearing a shirt that said, “Thank a straight person today for your existence. Straight pride.”

Now, I’m not conspiracy-minded and I don’t believe the man was a Liberal Paty infiltrator, but he may as well have been for how the Liberals have been salivating over this picture ever since. It doesn’t matter that Poilievre has said, “I don’t agree with that shirt.” According to MPs like Randy Boissonnault, he should have “known better.”

This is, of course, assuming that Poilievre actually saw and read the shirt in the first place. Consider when my friend Lois joined the Alberta NDP at the Calgary Pride Parade and got photos with numerous politicians—including Rachel Notley, Janis Irwin, David Shepherd, and Brooks Arcand-Paul while wearing a cape and a hoodie featuring the pride flag with the progressive chevron obviously cut out. The NDP even went as far as to put Lois front and center, holding the banner (they were eager for the two-spirit representation, I suppose).

Should they have “known better”? Of course not. These are people who, like Poilievre, are constantly taking photos with supporters. They were also busy getting ready to march in the parade.

But, even assuming that Poilievre realized what the shirt said, the idea that he should have refused a photo because of it is absurd. Perhaps he indeed would have in order to avoid the resulting year of nonsense, but I think it’s very sad that our political climate is such that the shirt caused such a histrionic reaction in the first place and that it resulted in one of the most pathetic games of guilt-by-association I have ever seen.

All year, the Liberal Party account has been tweeting about that damn shirt. It doesn’t matter that they keep getting ratioed—they’ve found a dead horse and they are going to keep beating it if it’s the last thing they do.

All this does is make it blatantly obvious to me that the Liberal Party doesn’t care one bit about gay people. They wish that Poilievre hated us so that they could actually use it to their political advantage. But he doesn’t, and they know he doesn’t, so instead they desperately fearmonger about that stupid shirt in order to at least make us believe we are in danger.

When you actually care about someone, you don’t actively try to scare them and make them believe that things are worse than they are. That’s sadistic.

Another thing is that, every time they bring up the T-shirt yet again, it makes me want to buy and wear such a shirt, and I am as gay as they come. It activates my worst (or best?) contrarian instincts.

And while it would simply be funny if I wore such a shirt, the reality is that it no doubt is causing a similar contrarian reaction in many other people who then decide that maybe they aren’t just sick of the Liberal party, but all the gays as well.

I don’t care about the intentions of the man in the photo. Perhaps he was just trying to make a point but isn’t homophobic. Personally, I know a few guys who would probably pull the same stunt but who are perfectly friendly with me and don’t hate me at all.

Or perhaps he’s a horrible homophobe who hates gay people and wants me to have no rights. In that case, the Liberals and all the progressives who spread the picture online and in the idea are playing right into his hands. Without them, it would have just become a forgotten photo. But with their help in provoking such an overblown reaction, they probably encouraged many to think that the gays have gone too far after all.

There are people out there who will take this reaction as proof that gay people hate straight people. Of course I think that’s silly, and I think everyone needs to have a thicker skin, but that’s still what is happening. The Liberal Party and the media complicit in all this fearmongering are stoking a completely unnecessary fight.

While it may be helping to galvanize their radical base, they still haven’t caught on to the fact that it is putting most people off. Until then, I have to painfully sit and watch them try to use people like me in this embarrassing manner in a desperate bid to cling to power.