It’s always sad to see the end of a love affair, particularly when the lovers had seemed so enraptured of each other, and so well-suited. But for every blissful lifelong idyll there’s one where, in Robert Browning’s words, the kissing has to stop, and the parting can be rancorous.

Such is the case with the end of the romance between Victoria’s LGBTIQ etc. ‘community’ and the Victoria Police. The police found themselves summarily ejected from the annual ‘Pride March’ last weekend. After many years of keen participation and happy rainbow flag-waving they were no longer welcome if wearing their uniform. It’s as if Juliet had decided to jettison Romeo for toxic masculinity.

It was not clear at first what had gone wrong. No one had strayed, there were no mutual recriminations. But the explanation is simple, according to Nevena Spirovska, ‘co-convenor of the Victorian Pride Lobby’. ‘Many people’ connected with the march had simply decided that they felt ‘unsafe’ with uniformed police around. This had emerged, she said, from ‘a survey’ last year. Several senior police who have been keen marchers and were looking forward with a swain’s ardour to turning up again this year expressed pained surprise at being cast aside, but that’s the rocky road of love for you.

You might say that the bust-up couldn’t have happened to two nicer parties. On the one hand, the gays and their allied exemplars of sexual ‘diversity’, petulant and pampered by the media and government. On the other, thick and about as politically corrupted as it’s possible to be in a society like ours, the coppers. They are meant to be impartial towards everyone but for years they have looked with special benevolence on the gay lobby, while showing their real moral character in such breaches of their duty as exploiting the relationship of trust between a lawyer and her clients and indulging the sectarian prejudice of some senior officers in trying to frame George Pell.

But why suddenly were the marchers feeling ‘unsafe’? Interviewed by Neil Mitchell on Melbourne’s 3AW, Nevena gave no reason except to refer to LGBTIQ folk who had their ‘heads bashed’ by police. She named no names and since there is no record of any ‘Pride’ marcher who has had his or her (or ‘their’) head bashed by the police ever, one suspects she was making it up.

The real reason for banning the police from the march, of course, is our national habit of importing other people’s grievances and adapting them to the requirements of local troublemaking. We saw it in the Black Lives Matter protests where Aborigines were cast in the role of an oppressed minority, a part assigned in the original protests in America to George Floyd and African-Americans. This time the copycats are Victoria’s Pride Lobby. It just so happens that they will have seen in the news a few days earlier that ‘Pride’ organisers in New York had banned uniformed police from marching in the parade there. So let’s do it here, they said to themselves, without a trace of original thinking. We can’t be left behind the times, we’re no backwater. What happens in an exciting cosmopolitan place like New York must happen in exciting cosmopolitan Melbourne, Victoria.

Nevena herself would seem to represent the radical voice of the younger gay activist. She’s a package-deal protestor, very common on the idiot Left these days, who’s also big on ‘climate action’ and something called ‘social equity’ and describes herself as a ‘dedicated community volunteer’. She is ‘based in’ (which makes it sound as though she’s forever flitting hither and thither around the globe) somewhere called Naarm. This is helpfully translated on her website as Melbourne, so there are no prizes for guessing what she thinks about our country’s history. ‘Sovereignty was never ceded,’ she informs us, ‘and this was and always will be Aboriginal land.’ They’ve turned cunning, these European-descended peddlers of the myth that Australia was invaded by Europeans, so that when asked why they don’t in that case stop trespassing on Aboriginal land and just nick off, they can say, as does Nevena, ‘I Pay the Rent’ – in her case to sundry pseudo-Aboriginal entities that have apparently arrogated to themselves the right to collect it.

Nevena is also an ‘organiser with the National Homeless Collective’. There are plenty of homeless, particularly Aboriginal homeless, in St Kilda, where not only does the march take place but Melbourne’s LGBTIQ establishment has just built its costly new ‘Pride Centre’, fruit of much Victorian government and local council generosity with taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ money. Nevena will be able to devote some of her concern to these unfortunates sleeping rough outside this meretricious edifice. Perhaps she can intervene to stop them being regularly shunted along (by police) dutifully making sure the Centre’s gleaming glass portals are kept unencumbered for its entitled membership on their way inside for a ‘queer coffee’ or a ‘tomboy party’ or to make a quick visit to Be Who You Are (‘clothing and makeup support for transgender women all ages 16+’).

The march, postponed since ‘Midsumma’, and itself heavily subsidised by the unconsulted taxpayer, was somewhat reduced this year. Denim-clad lesbians pushing prams, a sine qua non of these occasions, were there and various other ‘contingents’, including a group sponsored by one of Australia’s largest banks. In the event, a few police officers managed to slip in under the radar as part of the ‘emergency services’ marchers but not before a video had been shown in which the message of the police as enemy had been solemnly reinforced by an account of some distant alleged ‘brutality’. The evidence was so thin that Aboriginal deaths in custody had to be shoehorned in to show how bad the police still are.

One wonders whether this hostility to the police has the support of the older, statelier gays and lesbians on the ‘Pride Centre’ board. For their generation it was quite a coup some years ago to have the guardians of the law, symbol of past ‘entrapment’ and ‘homophobia’ (and presumably head-bashing) join the march in happy harmony, their smart blue uniforms no longer a symbol of prejudice and oppression but of smiling acceptance of the delights of diversity in the paradise of inclusivity Victoria has become under the enlightened leadership of Labor. Now, if younger gays see the police as a threat, is this a first crack in the façade of unity between the fair-weather friends of identity politics? Is that paradise threatened?  We shall see.