What do you do when the two most politically correct and protected groups in the West come to blows? This has to be one of the great dilemmas for the secular left. When their two most fav pet causes come into conflict, the need to take sides can be a painful process.
I refer to the most PC causes of our day: homosexualism and Islamism. Both are icons of the secular left. It is hard to know who gets the most preferential treatment in the secularised West: Muslims or homosexuals. And because both especially despise Christianity, the two have more in common than one might suspect. The left is intent on destroying the West, which is why it champions the radical homosexual agenda, and winks at the atrocities of radical Islam.
I have written before about the left’s strange dalliance with Islam. Here are two such articles:
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/10/18/islam-and-the-left/
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2013/02/27/clear-thinking-on-islam-and-the-left/
But as I have often said, when Islam consolidates its powers in the West, the first to go will be these clueless lefties, along with their homosexual agenda. And given Islam’s official contempt of homosexuality (the actual occurrence and practice of homosexuality in the Islamic world is another matter), it was only a matter of time before these two protected political species would come into open conflict in the West.
So a lesbian walks into a Muslim barbershop, and asks for a “businessmen’s haircut”. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it really happened, and now a government agency called the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario will hear her complaint.
Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo. Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say, they don’t believe in touching women other than their own wives.
But that’s what multiculturalism and unlimited immigration from illiberal countries means. A central pillar of many immigrant cultures is the second-class citizenship of women and gays. So if we now believe in multiculturalism, and that our Canadian culture of tolerance isn’t any better than the Shariah culture of sex crimes and gender apartheid, who are we to complain when Omar Mahrouk takes us up on our promise that he can continue to practise his culture — lesbian haircuts be damned?
He’s not the one who passed the Multiculturalism Act, and invited in hundreds of thousands of immigrants with medieval attitudes towards women and gays and Jews, etc. We did. Mahrouk’s view is illiberal. But in Canada we believe in property rights and freedom of association — and in this case, freedom of religion, too. But McGregor ran to the Human Rights Tribunal and demanded that Mahrouk give her a haircut.
In the past, human rights commissions have been a great ally to gay activists. Because, traditionally, gay activists have complained against Christians. And white Christians are the one ethnic identity group that human rights commissions don’t value, and that multiculturalism doesn’t include.
He looks at some other recent cases along these lines, then offers this humorous but completely accurate assessment of the situation:
McGregor is politically correct. But just not politically correct enough. It’s like poker. A white, Christian male has the lowest hand — it’s like he’s got just one high card, maybe an ace. So almost everyone trumps him. A white woman is just a bit higher — like a pair of twos. Enough to beat a white man, but not much more.
A gay man is like having two pairs in poker. A gay woman — a lesbian like McGregor — is like having three of a kind. A black lesbian is a full house — pretty tough to beat. Unless she’s also in a wheelchair, which means she’s pretty much a straight flush.
The only person who could trump that would be a royal flush. If the late Sammy Davis Jr. — who was black, Jewish and half-blind — were to convert to Islam and discover he was 1/64th Aboriginal. So which is a better hand: A lesbian who wants a haircut or a Muslim who doesn’t want to give it to her?
I’m betting on Mahrouk. And I predict that Muslim activists — not quiet barbers like Mahrouk, but professional Muslim busybodies — will start using human rights commissions more and more to push their way into places where they have no legal right, but where the human rights commissions are more than happy to engineer things for them, if they complain loud enough.
If I were a gay activist, I’d probably want to declare victory and shut down these human rights commissions right now. In five years time, it won’t be gay activists forcing themselves into Christian B&Bs. It’ll be Muslim activists vetoing the gay pride parade.
This episode is relevant in light of the recent move by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer to knock back legislation which would have defended religious freedom in that state. I discussed this here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2014/02/27/you-will-comply-or-else/
In a recent column Howard Portnoy reflects on both cases: “The incident occurred in Canada in November 2012, but it could easily happen here and now. Let’s take a state at random — say Arizona — and graft on the same scenario. Gay rights activists usually tend to be protectors of adherents to America’s lone ‘diverse’ religion, Islam, so where do their sympathies lie?
“This question is a real head scratcher in Canada, which passed a Multiculturalism Act in 1988, paving the way for an influx of immigrants with medieval attitudes toward second-class citizens (read: women and gays). Faith McGregor belongs to both groups….
“When government attempts to decide which protected class of citizens is more aggrieved in cases like this, they run into trouble. The only ‘out’ is to look the other way, which is what liberals have been doing here for years. The question of tolerance for one protected group over another arose during the murder trial of George Zimmerman, when the prosecution’s star witness Rachel Jeantel intimated under cross-examination that Trayvon Martin was anti-gay.
“Do you recall any marches by the Lambda Society or GLAAD denouncing blacks for their Stone Age view of homosexuality? Nah. Instead, liberals buried their heads in the sand, waiting till the news cycle moved on to other headlines. Hypocrisy much?”
Yes it is all very hypocritical all right, but it is nice to see the various PC heavyweights locked in this conundrum, with the obvious faults of our multiculturalism and equal opportunity policies coming so sharply into focus here.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/11/16/gay-activists-have-met-their-match-with-muslim-barbers
http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/03/02/muslim-barber-refuses-cut-hair-lesbian-whose-rights-trump-whose/#yoyAqjFFCsa6XMJi.99
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