The Undocumented Mark Steyn (46 page)

THE PINKSHIRTS

The National Post
, April 11, 2012

YOU GO AWAY
for ten minutes, and come back to find there’s a new acronym in town. “Dueling Queen’s Park Protests Planned over GSAs,” reports
Xtra
. “OECTA Comes Out in Favor of GSAs,” reports
The Catholic Register
. “Obama Blames Bush for GSA Scandal,” reports Fox News.

Honestly. Is there anything that isn’t Bush’s fault? No, wait. That last one turns out to be an American GSA—the Government Services Administration, the government agency that picks out the office furniture for the other government agencies and is currently under fire for flying itself to Vegas and throwing itself a lavish party with clowns (professional clowns, not just government bureaucrats) and a fortune teller, who curiously enough failed to foretell that the head of the agency would shortly thereafter lose her job. By contrast, Canada’s GSA is the Gay-Straight Alliance. The GSA is all over the GTA (the Gayer Toronto Area), but in a few remote upcountry redoubts north of Timmins intolerant, knuckle-dragging fundamentalist school boards declined to get with the beat. So the Ontario Government has determined to afflict them with the “Accepting Schools Act.”

“Accepting”? One would regard the very name of this bill as an exquisite parody of the way statist strong-arming masquerades as limp-wristed passivity were it not for the fact that the province’s Catholic schools, reluctant to accept government-mandated GSAs, are proposing instead that they should be called “Respecting Differences” groups. Good grief, this is the best a bigoted theocrat can come up with?

Bullying is as old as the schoolhouse. Dr. Thomas Arnold, one of the great reforming headmasters of nineteenth-century England, is captured in the most famous novel ever written about bullying, Tom
Brown’s Schooldays
, in what, by all accounts, is an accurate summation of his approach to the matter:

         
“You see, I do not know anything of the case officially, and if I take any notice of it at all, I must publicly expel the boy. I don’t wish to do that, for I think there is some good in him. There’s nothing for it but a good sound thrashing.” He paused to shake hands with the master. . . . “Remember,” added the Doctor, emphasizing the words, “a good sound thrashing before the whole house.”

These days, a Thrashing Schools Act mandating Thrashing Out Differences groups across the province would be the biggest windfall for Chief Commissar Barbara Hall and her Ontario “Human Rights” Commission since the transsexual labiaplasty case went belly up.
¹
Teachers are not permitted, in any meaningful sense, to deal with the problem of bullying. And, when you can’t deal with a problem, the easiest option is to institutionalize it. Thus, today is the Day of Pink, “the international day against bullying, discrimination, homophobia and transphobia.” Don’t know how big it is in Yemen or Waziristan, but the Minister of Education for the Northwest Territories is on board, and the Ontario MPP Peggy Nash has issued her own video greeting for the day, just like the Queen’s Christmas message: “Today’s the day we can unite in celebrating diversity and in raising awareness. . . .”

So it’s just like every other bloody boring day in the Ontario school system then?

Meanwhile, Cable 14 in Hamilton has been Tweeting up a storm: “National Day of Pink/Anti-Bullying Day is tomorrow. What will you be wearing?”

Er, I don’t think I have a lot of choice on that front, do I? “For schools holding Anti-Bullying events in April, you still have time to order shirts at a discount.” That’s great news! Nothing says “celebrate diversity” like forcing
everyone to dress exactly the same, like a bunch of Maoists who threw their workers’ garb in the washer but forgot to take the red flag out.

If you’re thinking, “Hang on. Day of Pink? Didn’t we just have that?” No, that was Pink Shirt Day, the last Wednesday in February. This is Day of Pink, second Wednesday in April. Like the King streetcar, there’ll be another one along in a minute, enthusiastically sponsored by Scotiabank, Royal Bank of Canada, ViaRail, and all the other corporate bigwigs.

If you’re thinking, “Hang on. Pink awareness-raising? Isn’t that something to do with breast cancer?” No, that’s pink ribbons. Unfortunately, all the hues for awareness-raising ribbons are taken: not just white for bone cancer and yellow for adenosarcoma, but also (my current favorite) periwinkle for acid reflux. We need to raise awareness of how all the awareness-raising ribbons have been taken, so anti-bullying groups have been obliged to move on from ribbons to shirts.

If you’re thinking, “Hang on. That sounds vaguely familiar,” it is. P. G. Wodehouse,
The Code of the Woosters
(1938):

         
“Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. . . .”

               
“By the way, when you say ‘shorts,’ you mean ‘shirts,’ of course.”

               
“No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.”

               
“Footer bags, you mean?”

Pink Shorts Day is the second Wednesday in October in the Northwest Territories.

Yes, there have been a small number of bullied teens driven to suicide, and these particular deaths are tragedies for the families involved that blow a great big hole in their lives that can never be repaired. But they are not a cause for wrongheaded public policy. Hard cases make bad law, and hard cases hijacked by social engineers, backed by make-work bureaucracies, and bankrolled by
dimwit craven pandering boardroom patsies make bad law on a catastrophic scale.

According to the Toronto District School Board’s own survey, the most common type of bullying is for “body image”—the reason given by 27 percent of high school students, 38 percent of grades seven and eight, and yea, back through the generations. Yet there are no proposals for mandatory Fat-Svelte Alliances or Homely-Smokin’ Alliances.

The second biggest reason in Toronto schools is “cultural or racial background.” “Cultural,” eh? Yet there seems no urge to install Infidel-Believer Alliances in Valley Park Middle School’s celebrated mosqueteria,
²
although they could probably fit it in the back behind the menstruating girls. So the pressure for GSAs in every school would seem to be a solution entirely unrelated to the problem. Indeed, it would seem to be a gay hijacking of the issue. Queer Eye for the Fat Chick: “But enough about you, let’s talk about me.”

What about if you’re the last non-sexualized tween schoolgirl in Ontario? You’re still into ponies and unicorns and have no great interest in the opposite sex except when nice Prince William visits to cut the ribbon at the new Transgendered Studies Department. What if the other girls are beginning to mock you for wanting to see
Anne of Green Gables
instead of
Anne Does Avonlea
? Is there any room for the sexual-developmentally challenged in the GSAs?

Why, of course! GSAs are officially welcoming of gays, straights, and even those freaky weirdy types who aren’t yet into sexual identity but could use a helpful nudge in the right direction. “Advisors Say GSA Also for Straight Students,” as the headline to a poignant story in yesterday’s edition of the Pembroke Academy newspaper in New Hampshire puts it. The school-approved GSA began five years ago with an ambitious platform of exciting gay activities. “They had plans for group events, like bake sales and car washes, but they never came to pass,” explained Ms. Yackanin, the social studies teacher who served as the GSA’s first advisor.

From a lack of gay bake sales and gay car washes, the GSA has now advanced to a lack of gays. “The students just stopped coming,” said Mrs. McCrum, the new Spanish teacher who took over the GSA at the start of this school year.

This is the homophobic reality of our education system: a school gay group that has everything it needs except gays.

Ms. Yackanin is reported by the Pembroke Academy paper as “saying to heterosexuals that the GSA is a resource for the entire school community.” C’mon, you guys, what’s wrong with you? No penetrative sex with other boys is required, or even heavy petting. It’s all about getting together in the old school spirit and organizing a gay car wash.

And now the model that has proved so successful at Pembroke Academy will be enthralling school-children from Thunder Bay to Moosonee. In Thomas Arnold’s day, the object was to punish bullies, and teach their victims to stand up to them. Now a defensive and enfeebled educational establishment lets the bullies get on with it, and Dalton McGuinty’s ministry has decided everyone else should be taught how to be victims—or, at any rate, members of approved victimological identity groups. Gays? Sure. Muslims? You betcha. Gay Muslims? We’ll cross that Rainbow Bridge when we come to it. For the moment, let’s stay focused: Bullying is merely the sharp end of “heterosexism,” as the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission calls it. Chief Commissar Hall defines heterosexism as “the assumption that heterosexuality is superior and preferable,” which will come as news to anyone who’s had sex with me.

When you shrink from punishing the bullies (as our schools do), when you pursue phantom enemies (as our “human rights” nomenklatura do), when you use the victims as a pretext for ideological advancement (as the Ontario government is doing), all that’s left is the creepy, soft totalitarian, collectivized, state-enforced, glassy-eyed homogeneity of “uniting to celebrate diversity” (in Peggy Nash’s words).

So Canada will have GSAs from Niagara to Nunavut; and for the lonely and unsocial, the lumpy and awkward, real bullying will proceed undisturbed in the shadows; and ideologically-compliant faux-bullying will explode, as a
generation of children is conscripted into a youth corps of eternal victimhood, alert to every slight, however footling. In New York, where children are bullied with gay abandon, the school board recently proposed banning from its tests fifty hurtful, discriminatory words such as “religious holidays,” “birthdays,” and “cigarettes.” From such an environment come a cowed pliant herd and a cadre of professional grievance-mongers, but not a lot of functioning, freeborn citizens.

“Awareness-raising”? I think we need to raise awareness that, unless you’ve got the T-shirt concession, all these Pink Days are worthless crap that do nothing for the problem they claim to be addressing. If you’ve chanced to see me in person, you’ll know I often wear a pink shirt (I may even wear one on stage in Toronto later this month). Like the country song says, “I Was Pink Shirt When Pink Shirt Wasn’t Cool—Er, Mandatory.” But, on Pink Shirt Day, I would wear mauve or turquoise or chartreuse or anything but pink, because, when the state is committed to coercing a ruthless conformity, that’s the time to show that a flickering flame of the contrarian, iconoclastic spirit still flickers in the Canadian schoolhouse. You may get bullied for not wearing pink on the Day of Pink, but you’ll feel better for it.

1
    
This was at the time of my own difficulties with the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission. A lady had gone to see a surgeon who specializes in labiaplasties for aesthetic reasons. When the doctor had discovered his would-be patient had been born a man, he declined to perform the labiaplasty on the grounds that, as a specialist in (biological) lady parts, he had no idea what he was getting into. So she took him to the HRC and made his life hell.

2
    
See “How Unclean Was My Valley.”

LITTLE STASI-ON-AVON

Maclean’s
, April 29, 2010

NOT LONG AFTER
the fall of the Iron Curtain, I chanced to be in Hungary making a TV film co-produced by the BBC and MTV. Not the MTV of caterwauling rockers but MTV as in “Magyar Televízió”—their version of the BBC, although obviously nowhere near as monolithically left-wing. We spent the first few days in Budapest meeting our local contacts—producers, fixers, interviewees, all of whom were urbane Mitteleuropean charmers, and delightful company. We’d then go on to the next meeting, at which we’d be assured by György that, while József may on the surface seem urbane and charming, he’d spent the previous thirty years as an informant for the Ministry of the Interior. Moving on to our appointment with Gábor, we’d be told that it was the eminently civilized and amusing György who’d been the state informer for the past several decades. Needless to say, Viktor had much the same to say about Gábor, and Imre about Viktor.

The BBC lads found this most disquieting. They had no objection to Commies per se, being mostly the usual bunch of university Trots and Marxists themselves. But they disliked the idea of snitches, of never being able to be sure whether your neighbor or workmate wasn’t sneaking to the authorities on your every casual aside. It offended against their sense of fair play; it wasn’t cricket. I took a more relaxed view, having been on the receiving end of the famous British sense of fair play, not least in my dealings with the duplicitous bastards at the BBC. I figured sure, Gábor and Viktor and József and Imre and György and pretty much everyone else we ran into in that post-Soviet spring doubtless had their dark secrets, but under a totalitarian regime the state can
apply all kinds of pressure those of us in free societies can scarce imagine. Who are we to judge?