He also said he intends on appealing the decision to strip the school of its Catholic identity. In a statement, the school’s president Thomas McKenney said “though any symbol or flag can be co-opted by political groups or organizations, flying our flags is not an endorsement of any organization or ideology, they fly in support of marginalized people.” We do not teach that in our schools.”Īfter the warning, however, the school continued to fly the flags. In April, McManus issued a warning about the flags as well, and said of the Black Lives Matter flag that is has “been coopted by some factions which also instill broad-brush distrust of police and those entrusted with enforcing our laws. “However, the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has co-opted the phrase and promotes a platform that directly contradicts Catholic social teaching on the importance and role of the nuclear family and seeks to disrupt the family structure in clear opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church.” “The Catholic Church teaches that all life is sacred and the Church certainly stands unequivocally behind the phrase ‘black lives matter’ and strongly affirms that all lives matter,” he wrote. When writing of the Black Lives Matter flag, he differentiated between the statement “black lives matter” - which he styled in lower case letters - and the Black Lives Matter movement. Posted by Nativity School of Worcester on Monday, June 21, 2021 Even though we know the US hasn’t always met that aspiration in practice, we should still aspire for equality instead of waving multiple flags for every conceivable identity group.Happy Pride Month from Nativity Worcester! We stand with and support all members of our community who identify as LGBTQIA+ and we invite people of all walks of life to celebrate the diversity in our community! The ideal of the American flag is to provide ‘liberty and justice for all’. There’s no need for additional flags at US embassies. In this context, US support and funding looks like outside interference, and risks making a tense diplomatic situation worse. Donbas is a war-torn region of south-eastern Ukraine, where it is reported up to 100,000 Russian troops are currently massed on the Russian side of the border. In other words, let’s make Donbas queer!’ KyivPride goes on to note that this project is ‘made possible by’ funding from the United States Agency for International Development.
The KyivPride going east project aimed at mobilising the LGBT+ community in Donbas started in May. The Ukrainian organisation KyivPride recently tweeted: ‘KyivPride invades eastern Ukraine. Culture wars between countries can easily escalate into actual conflict. In this arena, Putin gives as good as he gets, presenting himself as the protector of tradition, denouncing the US and other Western nations as ‘ genderless and infertile’. But it is criticisms of Russia’s culture, as patriarchal and sexist, that provide Washington with a much greater sense of moral superiority. The list of US complaints about Putin and Russia is long – including interference in US elections, the cyber-hacking of US pipelines and crackdowns on anti-Kremlin demonstrations. An academic study of the promotion of rainbow flags and other gay-rights symbols finds it is often not well-received, because such symbols are associated with outsiders: ‘LGBTQ symbols originating in the West, such as Pride and rainbow flags, have backfired in many places, such as Uganda and Russia, where nationalists and conservatives argue they are symbols of foreign degeneracy, antithetical to local mores.’Īt times, it feels like the US and Russia are about to break out into a full-blown culture war. Countries with more traditional attitudes to religion, family and sexual orientation, particularly in Africa and eastern Europe, also feel threatened by the promotion of woke American causes.