That’s how you do it, Canada

You don’t hire him again. You suspend him.

From CNN:

A high school teacher has been placed on administrative leave in California after he wore blackface to school on Halloween, according to the Milpitas Unified School District.


A video posted on social media shows the teacher with his face painted black and dressed up in an apparent attempt to imitate the rapper Common.
Milpitas High School Principal Francis Rojas and MUSD Superintendent Cheryl Jordan said in a statement that the teacher, who has not been named, was suspended and now is under investigation for the “disparaging” act.


“In a school community where we welcome learners and families from over 50 languages who represent cultures and religions throughout the world, and where our long-standing neighborhood, Sunnyhills, was established as the first city in the nation for planned integration, it hurts to know that this type of cultural insensitivity and lack of cultural awareness still hovers in the background,” reads the statement.


Chris Norwood, the MUSD school board president, called the teacher’s actions “inappropriate, unprofessional and insensitive,” according to an online statement.
“As an African American man, the history of Blackface reminds me of the cruelty, hatred and fear my parents and people of African Ancestry have dealt with in the past and still experience today around the world,” Norwood said.


Gay kids, trans kids, are made in God’s likeness

…how could they not be?

Read Rosie, who is at her passionate best, here.

Oh, and she quotes what the Pope and the relevant Ontario minister have to say.

Heed them, not the haters.

Pope Francis: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?I am glad that we are talking about homosexual people because before all else comes the individual in his wholeness and dignity. People should not be defined only by their sexual tendencies: let us not forget that God loves all his creatures and we are destined to receive his infinite love.”

Minister Lecce: “My message to the board is quite clear. My expectation is that every child, irrespective of differences, can see themselves reflected in school and, more importantly, that (the board) will adhere to the Ontario Human Rights Code.”


Good start.

Maybe it’ll even work.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is preparing to meet with opposition leaders as the Liberals start to map out how they will govern in a minority Parliament and identify a legislative agenda that other parties will support.

The Liberal Leader has kept a low profile since the election two weeks ago where he lost his majority government but hung onto the prime minister’s job. Behind the scenes, the Liberals have been working on the transition to a minority government, where they will need the support of either the Conservatives, NDP or Bloc Québécois to pass legislation.

Mr. Trudeau’s office reached out to all four opposition leaders, spokesperson Chantal Gagnon said Sunday. The Conservatives, NDP and Greens all confirmed their leaders will meet with the Prime Minister some time in the week of Nov. 11.


“Our culture is dying because we have no capacity for forgiveness or discussion.”

Cancel culture, so-called, interests me. Two reasons.

First reason: Barack Obama decried it recently, and what he said made a lot of sense. Here’s part of what he said:

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids. And share certain things with you.

The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough. That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”

Second reason: I’ve been “cancelled,” a bit. Someone broke into our files at the office, and stole some material. What they stole has found its way into the hands of others – mainly a reporter in Ottawa – who, inter alia, has sought to depict a gang of racists as victims, and demonize us for helping a group pro bono. Cancellers thereafter got to work.

It’s been weird, to say the least. I had more than 42,000 followers on Twitter, but I turned that off. I had thousands on three different Facebook platforms, too, but I logged out of those. You could say I self-cancelled, I guess. The invitations to kill myself got to be a bit much, so, bye. See ya.

Cancellation often happens because someone is seen as insufficiently ideologically pure. Sometimes, however, it happens because some people just dislike you, or disagree with you, and they want you to bleed.

This lengthy New York Times piece on cancellation mainly focusses on people who have been cancelled for ideological reasons. Quillette’s Jonathan Kay makes an appearance in there, too.

(Disclosure: Kay used to be my editor at the National Post, and – if nothing else – he’s always been pretty absolutist when it comes to speech issues. We weren’t buddies, to say the least, but he was right when he years ago said to me that the orthodoxy of progressives would – like a snake – one day start to consume itself.)

Anyway. Here’s some snippets from the Times piece. It’s a fascinating read.

“…The term for people who have been thrust out of social or professional circles in this way — either online or in the real world or sometimes both — is “canceled.”

…Readers want to hear from the canceled, but the larger motivation is philosophical. Quillette’s editorial point of view is that so-called cancel culture is overly punitive and lacks nuance. 

“When I went to law school, in the ’90s, the presumption of innocence was seen as a progressive value,” Mr. Kay said. “Because who is mostly wrongly accused of crime? Racialized minorities. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor. More often than not, it protects marginalized communities. And now the presumption of innocence is seen as a conservative value. And that troubles me.

…Cancellation does present a question about power, and who has it.

“The biggest problem we have as a culture is that we can’t define who the establishment is,” Mr. Tavana said. “Is the establishment the woke media people who own 99 percent of the keyboards in the country, or is it the old, canceled guys in media? Who’s the punk rock band and who’s the corporate rock band?”

Mr. Rubin imagines a near future where everyone is canceled for 15 minutes.

“The woke progressives are going to implode, and pretty soon they’ll destroy everything,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how much will they take down with them. They’re going to cancel Barack Obama one day, because Obama ran against gay marriage at one time.” 

Mr. Shapiro said, “Our culture is dying because we have no capacity for forgiveness or discussion.”


God, gays and Scheer

I wrote this some time ago – you know, during that period when I was secretly running the CPC campaign.

(More seriously, I was reminded of the below column by this report – although, I must say, some Conservatives are clearly using LGBTQ issues to take out Scheer, when they’ve never before shown much concern before for LGBTQ issues.)

The bar isn’t much to look at. 

It’s on the tougher side of downtown, in a place where you cross the street when you see a couple guys coming your way. 

There’s a big marquee out front, announcing its name, and a pair of weathered wooden doors that are open to all, but not all dare step inside. 

No liquor licence. Envelopes stuffed with bills, handed over to the cops, are all that keep it open. 

Whenever there’s a raid, the bar’s owners will sometimes get tipped off. Not always, but sometimes. The raids happen, ostensibly, because people gather there – people who dare not speak their name out loud. 

Their sin? Dancing. The city doesn’t want them to dance together. 

In the early morning hours of June 28, the cops raid the place again. There are uniformed officers outside, and some plainclothes officers inside, posing as patrons. 

The cops go after one of the women in the bar, a regular. They push her and strike her. She gets mad and pushes back. They assault her some more. 

A crowd has gathered out on the sidewalk, watching what the cops are doing to the woman. A cop brings his baton down on her head and she starts to bleed, a lot. 

She’s mad, but not just at the cops, who are punching and kicking the bar’s patrons. As she’s being pushed into the back of a police van, the woman yells at the crowd: “Why don’t you guys do something?”

And they do. Just like that, just like a light being switched on, they do. Remembering, perhaps, all the years of bullying and beatings and actual murders, they erupt. They hit back. 

By the end, they’ve trapped the cops inside the bar. And, later on, it’ll take dozens more cops to rescue them. 

The bar isn’t in your town, but it could be. The raid, or something like it, doesn’t really happen in your town anymore – but it used to. 

And the kind of people who would go there? They’re found in your town. Lots of them. 

The bar really existed. Stonewall’s, in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Anyone could go there to dance and have a drink, but only one of kind person generally did so. 

Homosexuals. Gays, lesbians. The ones who – in those days, and in these days, too – weren’t allowed to dance together. Or come together. Or even, you know, be. 

The ones who would be denied jobs, or hotel rooms, because of the way they were. The ones who would be often beaten and sometimes killed for being who they were. 

Their uprising that June night – that’s what that lesbian who the cops were beating called it, an uprising and not a riot – would later bear the name of the bar: Stonewall. Every year, bit by bit, in cities and towns all over, there would be a commemoration of what happened at Stonewall’s bar that night. Remembering. 

In time, the remembrances bore another name. A name that described what they were really about. 

Pride. Pride in being, at long last, in being who they are. Being how God made them. 

Now, I don’t know Andrew Scheer all that well. He’s a family man, he goes to church. If he stayed that way, nobody would really care what he thinks about the various Pride events that happen across Canada every Summer. He’d just be another guy. 

But he’s not just another guy. He’s not a nobody. He’s the leader of the Conservative Party, and he’s running to be Prime Minister. 

When you’re a Prime Minister, you don’t get to pick and choose which Canadians you represent. You represent all of us, or you represent none of us. 

So, I ask Andrew Scheer: are you going to be one of the guys on the sidewalk, watching and not doing anything about what you see? Or, are you going to step forward, and say: “I support you. I will help you. I will protect you. You are no better or no worse than me.”

That’s what the Pride stuff is about, really: equality. Support. Humanity. 

Get off the damn sidewalk, Andrew. 

People are starting to notice. 


Ms. Hébert on Mr. Trudeau

I totally disagree with her.

When you lose a million-plus votes, when you are shut out from Winnipeg to Vancouver, and when you lose a sure-thing second majority – and when nobody wants to hear from you, or any politician, for quite some time, thank you very much – laying low is a smart strategy.

I don’t know if they are feeling humbled, but they are looking humbled. As they should.