The alphabet soup some blue-haired, tatted-up individuals in Los Angeles are celebrating this month is, perhaps, the perfect picture of the leftist utopia. What do women who want to have unnatural relations with one another have in common with the guys that take unholy amounts of estrogen, hoping to rectify the so-called mistakes of biology? Nothing, really, except that they’re minorities.
In a perfect world, it wouldn’t just be the LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA (yes, that’s the full acronym) folks who would live in harmony with one another, but also the immigrant and the Muslim who would unite. The poor minorities, you see, are being oppressed. Wouldn’t it just be great if they could all band together and assert their collective rights against white men? (READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: What Does Defeating Pride Month Even Look Like?)
Except, as a children’s bookstore in the United Kingdom discovered a few days ago, they can’t quite seem to pull it off.
Ladybird Books isn’t your boutique one-off bookstore. It’s one of Britain’s oldest children’s book publishers and is owned by Penguin Random House. Once, not so long ago, it was famous for beautiful retellings of classics like The Ugly Duckling and The Princess and the Pea, replete with art that amazed and inspired. Unfortunately, like most book publishers, Ladybird has tended drastically leftward in recent years.
Today, you can find all sorts of modern and obnoxious titles featuring kids’ cartoon characters like Peppa Pig and Bluey. Looking for a title written to indoctrinate your child in the wiles of leftism? There are plenty. Which brings us to the social media post that rubbed Muslim occupants of the U.K. up in arms this week.
Looking to cash in on the Pride hype while appealing to the growing Muslim population in the U.K., Ladybird posted an illustration taken from Abbey Bryant’s Pride (First Festivals) featuring a Muslim woman in a hijab holding a baby and standing next to her “wife.” Predictably, the Muslim community took issue with that. While the Quran promotes plenty of problematic sexual acts, homosexuality is not one of them. (READ MORE: John Wick Was Right)
Unsurprisingly, Muslim commentators promptly began to sound a whole lot like the Right. “There is a mass attempt to infiltrate your child’s mind,” one TikToker warned her audience. “This is not compatible with Islam.” Muslim accounts on X echoed the sentiment; meanwhile, comments on the post itself complained that “this image misrepresents and disrespects” the Islamic faith. Then, perhaps recognizing that there might be some value in siding with the people currently defending the massive numbers of Muslim immigrants descending on the U.K. against Brits exhausted by the accompanying wave of violent crime, they threw the leftists a bone: “We can live beside each other, but have different values. I don’t want my children having these values,” one commenter clarified.
Assuming this social media post (and the prior publication of the book) weren’t just blatant misreadings of the Islamic religion, the Left is attempting to do something somewhat laudable: it’s trying to assimilate the Muslim immigrants flooding the U.K.
But perhaps “assimilate” is too weak a term. Really, this is an attempt at evangelization — the central tenet of the leftist creed is posted front and center on the social media post in question: “Everyone should feel free to be themselves, no matter who they are or who they love.” The Muslim moms who are worried that Western hedonism may infect their children via storytime at their British nursery are probably right to be concerned.
The trouble with the Left’s attempt at evangelization is that Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense of the word. Really, it’s merely an ideology — an attitude even — that attempts to embrace anything antithetical to Western civilization. Islam, on the other hand, is very definitely a religion (although a false one). It is made up of strict rules and boundaries; it believes in damnation and salvation — words the gay guys dancing down Main Street have excised from their vocabulary.
In attempting to evangelize the Muslims, the Left is essentially asking them to be “free to be themselves” with their strict rules and boundaries while simultaneously requiring them to embrace radical inclusion of individuals who practice lifestyles antithetical to those rules and boundaries. Coaxing Muslims who come from countries where execution is a cure for homosexuality into the leftist tent was never going to work. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Henry Nowak, the Inevitable British Civil War, and What It Means for Us)
And yet, we would do well to learn from the liberals at Ladybird. The fact is, there are a lot of Muslims to contend with, both in the U.K. and even here in the United States. Given historical precedent and the current political temperature in the U.K. and Northern Ireland, it seems unlikely we’ll be able to continue living side-by-side in peace indefinitely. Either we will be conquered by them, or we will convert them. The latter option seems the better one.
