Was 'DaVinciGate' the high water mark for Trans activism?
Are the organisers of the Paris Olympics, the IOC and the French Government the latest organisations to fall into the trap of discriminating against one group in their zeal to be seen as ‘inclusive’..
Photo’s Thomas Jolly’s tableau of the Drag Queens’ Last Supper may be the single biggest example of woke over reach to date.
Are the organisers of the Paris Olympics, the IOC and the French Government the latest organisations to fall into the trap of discriminating against one group in their zeal to be seen as ‘inclusive’ and their promotion of radical LGBT+? Friday’s Olympic Opening Ceremony’s ‘Drag Queen Last Supper’ is the latest in a daily series of such incidents, however, the sheer scale of those impacted and gathering wave of backlash could result in DaVinciGate being the high water mark of organisational activism. Going out of your way to deliberately offend 2.4 billion people, many of whom are facing persecution and death for their faith, at an event meant to unite the world, why would you do that?
We’ve seen many organisations in the UK and USA tumble down the rabbit hole of ‘allyship’ and end up discriminating against Gender Realists and people of faith, who are all protected, in the UK, under the Equality Act 2010 and thus such actions can be unlawful in the UK. At a time when many in the corporate world in the USA and the UK are coming to the belated and predictable conclusion that discriminating against employees and customers is not a sound business strategy and are therefore winding back their DEI and in some cases, like Tractor Supply and John Deere, completely scrapping it; in La Belle France it’s full steam ahead on imposing radical gender ideology on their population and a Gallic shrug to the consequences.
Only it wasn’t only their population that they targeted, it was a global population, specifically the 2.5 billion Christians who inhabit this rock.
So, what happened? It’s important to run through this because, as usual, there is an awful lot of gaslighting going on and people are being told by ‘those in charge of the narrative’ that what happened never happened.
The Olympic Opening Ceremony has, since the Barcelona games, become an excuse for a spectacle of excess, putting a host nation angle on the Olympic principle of putting aside our differences and meeting as equals on the field of sport. Friday was no exception, however, for some reason that no one has been able to adequately explain yet, the producers were allowed to stage a tableau of the Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci, replacing Christ and his 12 Disciples, with Drag Queens in various forms of fetish clothing and undress, one of whom had a wardrobe ‘malfunction’ as one of his testicles slipped out of the side of the ladies panties he was wearing. He, naturally, claims he didn’t notice. Well, as a man with testicles (that I have to say this shows where we are in 2024) I can say that this is utter bollocks as you are always extremely aware of what is ‘going on down there’ in the most vulnerable part of the human body. He did this deliberately.
So what’s the big deal? Well there are two issues here. Firstly there is the decision to deliberately attack the world’s largest religion and secondly there is the choice of doing this at an Olympic Opening Ceremony, an event meant to unite the globe over shared sporting endeavour. So, firstly, why are Christians getting their New Testaments in a lather? Surely this is just the French ‘avant garde’ and mocking religions has always been part of French culture so stick that in your Pernod and drink it. (OK then … do Islam next.). For those of you under 45 who are not Christians, I will explain. The Last Supper took place the night before Jesus was arrested and crucified. At the supper he told his Disciples that the Messiah was not the military leader that many Jews were seeking to throw off the Roman yoke, that he was on earth to bring eternal life for all through the sacrifice of his mortal body, he would take on him the sins of the world. He instructed his Disciples to spread the word, he sealed this Covenant by taking bread and wine and giving it to the Disciples, the bread: ‘this is my body, broken for you’; the wine: ‘this is my blood, shed for you’. The Last Supper was the point at which Jesus starts his final journey, one which has inspired billions of people across the world since that night in Jerusalem. It’s the most central part of Christianity, one which billions of Christians remember through the Act of Communion every week, core to the worship of all Christian sects.
Da Vinci’s The Last Supper is housed in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. Da Vinci painted it sometime between 1495 and 1498 and as well as being a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it is the most famous iconography of the event it records. LIke the Mona Lisa, it’s an work of art that remains a cornerstone of mass culture. Recreated countless times on everything from Church alter pieces to postcards. If you were going to choose a specific event and image to parody and attack Christianity, then there are not many which would be guaranteed to cause such offence. Interestingly, in the fall out the producer behind the Ceremony, Thomas Jolly, denied that it was inspired by The Last Supper, and here the gaslighting begins because, certainly the English translation of the Programme of Events, stated that it was certainly a tableau inspired by The Last Supper, suggesting that the work was exactly his inspiration.
Onto the second issue: why would you deliberately go out of your way to do this? If you wanted to include LGBT+ people and celebrate their lifestyles in the ceremony, you could have done it without targeting another group for mockery? Why even risk upsetting and alienating the world’s Christians if your intention is to unite people? The Gallic Shrug of an apology from the IOC is worth watching as a masterclass in contempt and hypocrisy. “We were being inclusive, we are sophisticated, and if you are upset, well we’re sorry [insert Gallic Shrug Here]. We are not strangers to organisations breaking their own rules, and occasionally national laws, in their zeal to demonstrate their own ‘inclusivity’ and here the IOC is no exception. The Olympic Charter is extremely strict - you are not allowed to display any religious, ideological, political, racial or other symbol beyond national flags and uniforms, nor are you allowed to use the Olympic Games as a platform for any display of partisan position, no matter how well intentioned or righteous the cause. Famously two black American athletes were kicked out of the games and suspended for showing the Black Power Salute on the medal podium in 1968. Yet, once again, the LGBTQ+ activist movement is apparently exempt from such rules. No, so important is it, the IOC will happily ignore their own rules.
We’ve already touched on the response from Monsieur Jolly, and the IOC, however, the response from the ‘metropolitan elite’ classes who think that the tableau was simply wonderful is truly illuminating and its one those of us fighting the politicisation of the workplace run into all too often. Anglo French Journalist Charlotte Kan was at pains to point out in The Sunday Telegraph how ‘wonderfully French’ the whole event was and that those who were upset were essentially unsophisticated and don’t understand that in France, we make fun of everything. [OK, now do Islam]. Ms Kan, incidentally has a CV that reads of monumental privilege and makes her living reporting on and associating with the boyars of globalism, a ‘Davos Type’ extraordinaire.
This is similar to the condescension that the Darlington Nurses ot the Tesco Women who wrote to Graham Linehan in desperation as their concerns over men accessing their changing facilities is being ignored by HR and they are worried about their jobs if they speak out. Such eliteism and contempt for the ‘less enightened’ is at the heart of the DEI industry across the globe. “You are morally deficient, you are racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic etc. and you don’t even know you are. Therefore we are going to both re educate you and force you to bow to our ideological and political position and if you refuse you will be fired/disciplined/ostracised/bullied.”
The hypocrisy is, of course, stratospheric. Every other ‘group’ must be tiptoed around unless offence is caused, ‘offence’ the tapestry of ‘Hate Speech Laws’ that besmirch the world in 2024 is something that is given and it is never the responsibility of the receiver to decide not to take offence, it is the responsibility of the give to ‘check their privilege’ to such an extent that the CIPD, responsible for HR training in the UK, is at constant pains to demand employers micromanage communications between employees unless ‘microaggressions’ cause offence. Just to be clear, what happened on Friday in Paris wasn’t a ‘microaggression’. The irony is, of course that in their conceit, they view their actions and the consequences thereof entirely through the lens of the educated, affluent western class - usually white as well. Upset about this: well you’re clearly a Barbarian.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Christian living in rural Nigeria and observing the events on Friday. This is a community that is being persecuted and murdered at an unprecedented rate, where entire congregations have been massacred, churches burned, children kidnapped, forced conversions to Islam. The Anglican Bishop of Lagos and Catholic Archbishop of Lagos have lost count of the number of their respective flock that have been murdered by the Islamists of Boko Haram. Indeed, the failure of Lambeth Palace to support their Anglican communities facing such persecution, and to instead, navel gaze over ‘microaggressions’ in the First World, is one of the main reasons why there is a schism in the Anglican Church which has seen the Global South break away from recognising Canterbury as its primary See. what must they think of Friday’s events. Not only are they ignored by the mainstream media in the west but the faith which they take so seriously they are martyred for it, is treated with open contempt at the event that is meant to respect all and unite the world. How the killers of Boko Haram must be chuckling behind their fists. Let us hope that these events don’t embolden them any further, afterall, of one of the cradles of Christian Civilisation, France, now shows such open contempt for Christianity, why would they step up to protect Nigerian Christians.
This willing blindness to recognise how this event has damaged communities across the globe, especially in Africa and South America is both a manifestation of white/western supremacy and cultural imperialism - the assumption that Christianity can be openly insulted in France, means that it is apparently appropriate to do this at a ceremony specifically designed to unite the world.
Of course, the IOC is at pains to claim that the ceremony was loved by 97.5% of the French population and 70% of global viewers. These statistics were suspiciously published within 30 hours of the broadcast. So I’m interested in how they got the results from places like Rural Nigeria, upstate Liberia, the Andean communities? Where are those figures from? Surely they didn’t just ask their Twitter followers, or online audiences? How can they possibly know what the opinion of the audience was within 30 hours of broadcast? Every survey organisation in the world will tell you those based wholly on ‘online’ results cannot be safely relied on for the simple fact that the online world is rife with confirmation bias bubbles. So another attempt to gaslight the public.
So, where does this leave us? I don’t think that this is going to go away anytime soon. It appears that some sort of cultural Rubicon was crossed on Friday night. It is highly unusual for the French Bishops to make any sort of comment and the Catholic Church in France has been, to date, passive even in the face of its priests being murdered in their churches and the huge rise in arson attacks on French Churches. Afterall, they don’t want to be seen as ‘Islamophobic’ or ‘racist’ in pointing the finger at the culprits. Yet, DaVinciGate seems to be the last straw for even the achingly woke French Church.
Having been at the front line in the ongoing scrap between radical gender activists and gender realists and having observed the number of institutions and organisations who seem to think that it is their moral responsibility to actively promote LGBTQ+ lifestyles to the extent that the rights of that group must always ride roughshod over the rights of others, especially women, we have seen many over reach in their zealous enforcement of radical ideology. This is exactly what we have here, albeit on a global scale. The activists have made a catastrophic error because, in their hubris they have assumed that they would be indulged by a global audience in the same way they are indulged in the west. In doing so they have attacked persecuted groups of people who are being tortured and murdered for their faith. Black and indigenous people in developing nations, struggling with poverty, many of whom hold their faith dearly to their hearts. As the events of Friday spread to these communities, the genuine hurt and confusion is all too real. It’s not a good look, is it?
I think Friday was a significant event in the culture wars and the high tide of organisational activism. We run an HR Consultancy that advises employers how to navigate the competing rights of employees and customers and the rule is that you should never, ever allow politics or activism in the workplace, nor should you nail your company’s colours to any 3rd party cause because you will inevitably alienate and upset and in some cases discriminate and act unlawfully against some of your employees or customers. The founders of the modern Olympiad understood that to unite people you focus on what they have in common - sport and forbid anything that could risk division, it’s the same for employers - unite your workforce around what brings you together - work - and do not take any position that threatens that unity.
'But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the LORD arose against his people, till there was no remedy' That's the old testament, preparing the ground for God's wrathful retribution - a message that remains strong in belief and even practice in the Holy Koran. The New Testament changed this. It presents a message included in the Last Supper of a man of sorrows, mocked, scourged, spat upon, suffering agony yet still loving. Ecce homo. That is still an idea that is demanding beyond the capacity of most humans, me included. Truly unattainable among us mortals. Speaking as a not very good atheist - bought up to regard unbelief as simply normal by parenting, school and culture - the Olympic mocking of the last supper, excused as a delightful Dionysiac orgy - left me unaffected. The new testament God would see it as human folly not to be taken seriously, to be gently ignored, yet it reminded me of one (as did your excellent piece pondering offence and pain taken far more widely among the genuinely persecuted) of one of the few, perhaps only, times Christ expressed passionate anger, as in Matthew's gospel "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."