Pride is now Canada’s state religion

In the history of Pride-loving Canadian prime ministers, you may have thought Justin Trudeau took first place. Apparently, he has competition.

Canada’s newest leader, Mark Carney, made an appearance at the Vancouver Pride Parade earlier this month. ‘This is the essence of Canada’, he announced, as he marched down the street and offered hugs to near-naked men in fetish gear.

To be fair, he’s not wrong. Since Trudeau came into power in 2015, Canada has earned a worldwide reputation as a country that embraces every extreme aspect of LGBT beliefs. It was, after all, Trudeau’s Liberal Party that introduced Canada’s gender-identity legislation, and has continued to support the use of puberty blockers on minors – a harmful pseudoscience that has been repudiated in the US, the UK and most of Western Europe.

Why we continue to celebrate Pride in a country that is clearly already accepting of all sexualities and identities, and where discrimination on such grounds is illegal, is a question worth asking. After all, what was once a political event, fighting discrimination and violence against homosexuals, has been reduced to a public advertisement for deviance and perversion.

Do I sound prudish? Fine. Maybe we could all benefit from a little more prudery. Certainly the Canadian prime minister could.

One viral image from Vancouver Pride showed Carney posing for a photo with a man dressed in ‘pup play’ fetish gear. For those not in the know, this is a subgenre of the gay male BDSM community, wherein men roleplay as either a ‘dog’ or ‘handler’. To the uninitiated, queer magazine Them offers further clarity: ‘It may be helpful to think of pups as a type of sub[missive] and handlers as dom[inant]’.

Describing this fetish as ‘the essence of Canada’ is actually pretty apt, considering Canadians have voluntarily entered into a BDSM-style relationship with their own government, receiving their punishment and asking for more, master.

The extent of Canada’s masochism was revealed in January, when Trudeau suspended parliament unchallenged. This didn’t only spare him the embarrassment of an inevitable General Election defeat – it also allowed him to select a political clone in Carney to be his successor (without the pesky interference of the Canadian public).

Prior to this, Trudeau’s Liberals had destroyed the economy, repeatedly violated the Charter rights of Canadians, illegally invoked the Emergencies Act to shut down the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, and frozen the bank accounts of those who supported this perfectly lawful protest.

Trudeau didn’t just impose a woke tyranny. He humiliated us, too. Canada became an international laughing stock after a male teacher was photographed teaching high-school students with recently installed size-Z prosthetic breasts. The world laughed just as hard when Trudeau expanded the LGBT+ acronym to include ‘Two Spirit’ Native Americans, creating the genuine alphabet soup of ‘2SLGBTQQIA+’. Now the world will be snorting at the sight of Carney hugging a grown man wearing only a g-string and leather harness.

If Carney’s recent appearance in Vancouver proves anything, it is that Pride has become Canada’s official state religion. The rainbow flag, which has recently incorporated various triangles into its design, is now as common a sight as the Maple Leaf. Public transport, school classrooms, government buildings and even churches – there is nowhere you can go without being reminded that bending the knee to Pride is not only expected, but demanded of you.

This has bred a dangerous intolerance. Actual religions like Christianity seem to have become unacceptable. We are routinely reminded of this when any conservative or Christian criticism of Pride or gender ideology is branded as ‘hate speech’ by the media and political elites.

This queer puritanism is beginning to have very serious consequences. Last month, eight cities across Canada banned the scheduled performances of an American Christian singer, Sean Feucht. He was banned because of his criticism of LGBT activism and Pride Month.

Feucht’s views are clearly at the extreme end of Christian conservatism. He described Pride as ‘a demonic agenda seeking to destroy our culture and pervert our children’. But they are not illegal – and freedom of expression, assembly and religion are still protected under the Canadian Charter. Neither I, nor you, nor the government has to like what anyone in Canada has to say, never mind an American singer whose concerts you can choose not to attend.

As the censoring of Feucht goes to show, Canada is very far from the paradise of acceptance and diversity it claims to be. Mark Carney can embarrass himself all he likes in front of the world, but he might consider that, beyond all those ass cheeks, what is really on display at Pride is the liberal elite’s hypocrisy.

Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer and the host of The Same Drugs podcast.