Barbara Kay: At Pride Toronto, militant feminist dogma trumped rights

Article here. Excerpt:

'According to its own policy, Pride Toronto doesn’t permit cancellations after June 21 — thereby ensuring that groups have an opportunity to respond to complaints lodged against them. CAFÉ, which has charity status (giving them more legal standing than most of the other participating groups), took part last year without incident and had two months ago successfully registered to walk this year, their name appearing in official Pride literature.

CAFÉ was given no substantive reason for the rejection, just a note from the Pride organizers: “It has come to our attention that the work of your organization may contravene the spirit of the mission, vision, and values of Pride Toronto and WorldPride.” And that was it. Their right to march was withdrawn. At a stroke, CAFÉ was lumped in with pedophilia-promoting groups such as Men Loving Boys Loving Men, the only other type of group I could find to have been spurned by Pride as inconsistent with its mission.
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Although CAFÉ’s broad mandate is freedom of speech, much of its activity has focused on raising awareness of men’s issues — including those that affect, say, the right of gay men (and all men) to have equal parenting rights under Canadian law. But feminists regard any such advocacy as a threat to their dogma. And so feminist activism, occasionally aggressive, has attended almost every men’s rights speaker sponsored by CAFÉ on Canadian university campuses. (I was one such speaker two years ago.) It therefore isn’t much of a stretch to infer that CAFÉ was booted from Pride because of the complaints of militant feminists.

For those who follow Pride politics, a certain irony leaps out here. The Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association marches, even though affiliated with some gay-alliance-unfriendly Catholic schools. More controversially, Pride defends the presence of the anti-Zionist group Queers Against Israel Apartheid, perceived as an outright hate group by many Jews, not to mention by many non-Jews, who can see that QuAIA’s mandate has nothing to do with Pride’s objectives (and in fact makes a mockery of them in focusing negative attention on the only gay-friendly nation in the Middle East).
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The feminist revolution began as a fight for equity reform in law, education and career opportunity. Those objectives were quickly achieved. But as in all revolutions, justice is never enough for the true believers; for them, the revolution is never over until all dissent from their dogmas is squashed.

And so the purges begin. In this case, the Detroit attempt gave strength to the counter-movement. But in Toronto, CAFÉ was sent to the guillotine, while feminists’ knitting needles flashed in the hot summer sun.'