Originally posted by
Aragorn
Here's the thing... Europe — and especially Belgium — is about as Woke™ and Inclusive™ as it gets. Petra De Sutter, the Vice-Premier of the Belgian Federal Government, is a transgender, even, and although I will not comment on said person's abilities — from what I've read, they've made some very sensible improvements, but on the other hand, they've also made several bad moves — the fact that they are Federal Vice-Premier is still an ostensible manifestation of Wokeism™, because Petra De Sutter is of the Green Party, and no one of the Green Party would ever have been considered for a role as Vice-Premier before. Socialists, Christian-democrats and Keynesian-liberals, yes, but never a greenie — their party is just too small for such a role.
However, Belgium is a federal state with two politically very different cultures — among three regional governments and three community governments — namely the Flemish political climate and the francophone political climate. The francophone political climate is unitarian — they seek to hold Belgium together as a single nation, although the far-right elements within said culture would have it exclusively be a francophone nation again, just as it was up until 1960, notwithstanding the fact that 2/3 of the Belgian population is Dutch-speaking — but here in the Flanders, the Flemish-nationalists rule, with one Flemish-nationalist party (N-VA) seeking to reform Belgium into a confederation, and the other one (VB) seeking to secede the Flanders from Belgium as an independent nation.
This last party is also the one farthest to the right, and they have already been convicted over racism in the past. Some of their subsidiary organizations have ties with the KKK in the USA and with neo-Nazi groups in Germany, and up until the early 1980s,, they even had their own private militia, of whom I could positively identify certain members, because one of them — a high-ranking one, known in their midst as the General — owned a local car dealership and garage in the village where I grew up.
As a result, the Flemish and francophone parties don't see eye to eye, and so when it came down to forming a coalition for the federal government, the Flemish and francophone parties had to sit at the negotiating table together. And that didn't go too well, because alongside of the competition between the Flemish and francophone agendas, there was also the competition between the individual parties along their party-political ideals — the left versus the right and everything in between, on both sides of the language border.
So it was an ugly mess, and it took them 14 months to form a coalition. And meanwhile, the corona pandemic had struck. So the then-incumbent federal government was then given a special emergency mandate to prolong its activity while all of the political parties were negotiating on a new federal coalition. And ultimately, such a coalition was formed, and the Green Party had to be included, as well as its Walloon counterpart, Ecolo, because the francophone parties would not accept the Flemish-nationalist parties into the coalition. — N-VA has over the last decade repeatedly been scoring landslide victories here in the Flanders, albeit that VB is automatically excluded from the negotiations by all parties because of its unbridled racism and homophobia.
So, my point is that if it hadn't been for the fairly right-wing electoral victory here in the Flanders, the Green Party would probably never have been part of the coalition, and would then also most certainly never have been providing a Federal Vice-Premier. But it did, and then this Federal Vice-Premier just so happens to be a transgender person of whom nobody had ever heard before — seriously, nobody! And the public (i.e. state-sponsored) news network loves Petra De Sutter — they can't stop bringing them up, and with lots of very large photos too — because the state-sponsored news network is very Woke™ and employs many LGBTQ people.
But all of the above is just contextual background to the point I'm about to make, which is that with a Federal Vice-Premier who is a transgender — and from the Green Party to boot — and with Belgium allowing gay marriage and infant adoption by LGBTQ+ couples, what exactly is there to still warrant not only an annual Belgian Pride parade, but also many other and regional Gay Pride parades spread out across different dates for different cities? I'm not kidding, there's always some Gay Pride parade somewhere in this country, like almost every month. Antwerp Pride, Brussels Pride, you name it, plus a number of LBGTQ+-specific festivals — not to be a dick, but that is actually how the monkeypox virus began spreading here, because all five of the first registered cases were homosexual males who had attended one such festival.
So tell me, why, with all of Belgium's Wokeness™, and with Belgian legislation fully compliant with LGBTQ+ demands, do there need to still be such parades, and not only once but like a dozen times? What is the purpose? What else do they still want, with all of their demands for equal rights having been met?
Attention, that's what. As Diabolical Boids said, they want to feel special, and they want to be seen as special.
Belgium also has a substantial immigrant population, with many of them being Muslims. And they have mosques, Muslim schools, and an official nation-wide organization looking after the interests of the Muslim community in this country. But you don't see them organizing dozens of Muslim parades every year. In fact, they're not even organizing a single parade. Or what about the also quite substantial Jewish population? They've got synagogues, Jewish schools, a Jewish museum, and a nation-wide organization looking after their interests. You don't see them gathering for any Jewish parades either.
And that's my point.