Mayor of Calgary, Alberta Plans to Use Street Harassment Bylaw Against Drag Protesters

The creation of the queer morality police

Gavin Young/Postmedia

On February 10, Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek held a press conference to announce that the city’s street harassment bylaw would be used against drag protesters, essentially creating a religious police force for the priestly drag queen class.

The announcement was in response to the postponement of two events—an on-ice drag show and a performance by DJ Gaysnakes—that had been planned for Chinook Blast, a Calgary winter festival.

Organizers claimed that “planned protests” of the events had prompted safety concerns but did not cite any specific reasons for these concerns.

Gondek herself explained that she was invoking the bylaw to deal with the “hateful messages” outside of such events. In other words: to deal with speech that she doesn’t approve of.

She made this point quite clear at the press conference:

“What you don’t have the right to do is use hateful language in a public space to make people feel unsafe and uncomfortable and unwanted. That can’t happen. So, what we ar…