Pride comes before a fall

Hockey is one of those games, like lacrosse, that alters as it crosses the Atlantic. In Britain, if a man says he is a passionate hockey or lacrosse player, he may get a certain ‘Fnar fnar’ response. In North America by contrast, it would be most unwise to ‘Fnar fnar’ at your average hockey player.

A good example comes in the form of Ivan Provorov. He is a big Russian-born ice-hockey player who currently plays for the Philadelphia Flyers in the National Hockey League. Not all readers will be following the NHL carefully, and I admit that I am teetering at the very edge of my knowledge as I type this. Still, the NHL grabbed my attention last week because Provorov became the latest victim of Big Gay’s overreach. Or to be precise, Big LGBTQI+’s overreach. As I have commented before, when gays didn’t have any rights the talk was all about equality and being allowed to do what you wanted so long as it didn’t harm anyone else. God knows, I was arguing the case for gay marriage in these pages years before it was cool. But after that and other victories were won, a cartel of gay groups and others who speak for almost no gays chose to take a harsher turn.

Suddenly Pride Month was to be treated as were holy days of old. The flag that started off as rainbow became so crazily ‘inclusive’ that it can now induce epilepsy, at which point it had to be flown from all public buildings. There are times when some city centres are positively festooned with these barmy flags, reminiscent of the time the King of Saudi Arabia visited London some years back and his nation’s none-too–welcoming scimitar flag was hung all the way down The Mall.