Most modern progressive left-wing governments operate on a convenient assumption: that every protected class, minority interest and social-justice cause can be assembled into a single harmonious coalition.
In Ireland, for example, the political establishment and a large network of state-funded NGOs attempt to champion an extraordinary range of causes simultaneously; from gender self-identification and diversity initiatives to animal welfare, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and multicultural integration.
Yet beneath the language of inclusion lies an awkward reality: these causes do not always fit comfortably together. Sometimes they come into direct conflict.
The political challenge resembles a juggling act. Each cause is another ball thrown into the air, and keeping them all aloft requires increasingly elaborate compromises. Eventually, however, contradictions become impossible to disguise. You cannot satisfy every constituency simultaneously when some of their fundamental demands point in opposite directions.
For decades, feminism fought to protect female spaces and to ensure that the particular experiences and interests of women were recognised. More recently, those achievements have come into tension with policies based on gender self-identification, particularly where gender identity and biological sex are treated as interchangeable.
These tensions are especially visible in areas such as women’s sports, prisons and healthcare, where policymakers must decide how far inclusion based on gender identity should extend when it conflicts with considerations of sex, safety, privacy or competitive fairness.
Sport provides the clearest example. Male puberty produces significant physiological differences relevant to athletic performance, including differences in height, skeletal structure, muscle mass, heart and lung capacity. The controversy surrounding Lia Thomas and NCAA swimming turned what had previously been an abstract argument into a highly visible conflict between two progressive principles: transgender inclusion and the protection of female sporting categories.
The same conflict has entered the courts. In Australia, Tickle v Giggle arose after a transgender woman was excluded from Giggle, a social-media platform intended for women. Whatever one thinks of the eventual judgment, the dispute illustrates something important: the interests claimed in the name of women and those claimed in the name of gender identity do not automatically coincide.
Even within the broader LGBT movement, disagreements have emerged. Organisations such as the LGB Alliance explicitly argue that sexual orientation and gender identity involve different political interests and should not always be treated as a single cause.
The conflict extends into public institutions:
The dilemma cannot simply be wished away. If women’s rights depend in some circumstances upon recognising sex as a meaningful category, then a political movement cannot simultaneously insist that sex is irrelevant whenever it conflicts with gender identity.
An even more striking contradiction appears when progressive feminism encounters deeply conservative religious traditions.
Western progressivism generally celebrates bodily autonomy, sexual freedom and resistance to traditional gender roles. Campaigns such as “Free the Nipple” have argued that social expectations of female modesty are themselves products of patriarchy.
Yet, within the same progressive political culture, garments such as the hijab, niqab and burqa are frequently presented primarily through the language of personal choice, cultural expression and empowerment. A recent example involved a Muslim woman receiving an award while wearing the niqab, with her choice of dress presented as part of her identity and public advocacy.
Of course, a woman freely choosing religious dress is different from a state forcing her to wear it. That distinction matters. But it also exposes the contradiction.
In Iran, women have risked imprisonment and physical violence for resisting compulsory dress requirements. The protests following the death of Mahsa Amini demonstrated how politically charged female clothing can become when religious modesty is enforced by law. Iranian women have repeatedly challenged compulsory veiling, while the transformation in women’s public appearance before and after the Islamic Revolution is documented in this BBC report.
The point is not that Muslim women lack agency. Clearly they do not. Nor is every woman who wears a hijab being coerced. The contradiction is political: a movement suspicious of traditional Christian expectations surrounding female sexuality can become remarkably reluctant to criticise comparable—or substantially stricter—expectations when they arise within minority religions.
That tension becomes much more serious when cultural sensitivity collides with practices that directly harm women.
Across Europe, authorities continue to confront Female Genital Mutilation, while the UK’s Forced Marriage Unit deals with hundreds of cases and potential cases each year. The murder of Banaz Mahmod, killed after leaving an abusive forced marriage, remains one of Britain’s most horrifying examples of so-called “honour”-based violence.
The lesson should be straightforward: cultural difference deserves tolerance only up to the point at which it collides with the rights and safety of individuals.
The failures surrounding the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal made this danger especially clear. Investigations found that concerns about race and fears of being perceived as racist contributed to institutional reluctance to confront aspects of the abuse. The 2015–2016 Cologne New Year’s Eve assaults similarly generated arguments about the tension between honest reporting, immigration politics and fears of fuelling xenophobia.
Multicultural sensitivity becomes indefensible when protecting a community’s reputation matters more than protecting vulnerable women and girls.
The same contradiction becomes even harder to ignore when LGBTQ+ activism intersects with conservative religious politics.
In Western cities, organisations have marched under banners such as “Queers for Palestine”. There is nothing inherently contradictory about an LGBT person defending Palestinian civilians or opposing a war; human rights are not conditional upon people sharing one’s values.
But a political contradiction does emerge when solidarity with a population or political movement requires silence about the treatment of homosexual people within deeply conservative societies.
Iran provides an obvious example. Same-sex sexual activity can attract severe criminal penalties, and LGBT activists have faced death sentences. More recently, Senegal—whose population is overwhelmingly Muslim—moved to increase criminal penalties for same-sex sexual acts from 5 to 10 years of prison.
These realities complicate the convenient Western assumption that religious minorities, feminists and LGBTQ+ activists naturally belong to a single political bloc.
The experience of Hamtramck, Michigan offers an unusually clear real-world illustration. Once a predominantly Polish-Catholic enclave, Hamtramck became America’s first city with an all-Muslim mayor and city council. It was initially celebrated by many commentators as a milestone for diversity and minority political representation. Then came the collision.
In June 2023, the council voted unanimously, 6–0, to prohibit Pride flags and other non-governmental flags from city-owned flagpoles. Supporters described the policy as religiously neutral; LGBT campaigners regarded it as a repudiation of a community that had previously supported Muslim political representation.
Whatever one’s interpretation of the policy, Hamtramck demonstrates the flaw in treating “diversity” as a single ideology. Diversity means genuinely different groups—and genuinely different groups eventually disagree.
The juggling act extends even to animal welfare. Ireland and the European Union generally require animals to be stunned before slaughter in order to minimise suffering. Animal-welfare campaigners have spent decades pushing governments toward increasingly stringent protections. England has even moved to prohibit boiling lobsters alive as part of the expansion of animal-welfare standards.
Yet European law also permits religious exemptions for ritual slaughter. Some Halal slaughter is carried out with pre-stunning, but traditional non-stun Halal and Kosher slaughter involves animals remaining conscious when the throat is cut. Ireland has permitted animals to be slaughtered without prior stunning under religious exemptions.
One can defend that exemption on grounds of religious liberty. One can oppose it on grounds of animal welfare. What is difficult is pretending that no trade-off exists. If stunning is legally required because slaughter without it causes unacceptable suffering, why should the animal’s experience become less important because the reason for the procedure is religious?
Here again, two cherished progressive principles—animal welfare and religious accommodation—collide. The honest response is not to deny the contradiction. It is to decide which principle takes precedence.
When political coalitions contain groups whose interests sometimes clash, what prevents those contradictions from tearing the coalition apart? One answer is the existence of a common adversary.
In contemporary European politics, the term “far-right” increasingly performs that function. The label is obviously legitimate when applied to genuinely fascist, neo-Nazi or authoritarian movements. The problem begins when its boundaries expand so far that substantially different positions are placed under the same heading.
A feminist questioning the placement of male-bodied prisoners in women’s prisons, an animal-welfare campaigner opposing non-stun slaughter, a parent objecting to aspects of a school curriculum and a voter favouring lower immigration may have very different motivations.
Yet all can find themselves described, sooner or later, as participating in a broader “far-right” politics. That rhetorical move is politically convenient. It shifts the argument away from the substance of the objection and toward the moral character of the person raising it.
Instead of asking whether a particular prison policy is safe, whether ritual slaughter causes avoidable suffering, whether immigration levels are sustainable or whether sex should matter in women’s sport, the debate becomes: What kind of person would ask such a question?
Once politics reaches that stage, labels begin replacing arguments. The “far-right” becomes useful precisely because it can function as political glue. Feminists, gender activists, religious minorities, LGBT campaigners, environmentalists and multicultural organisations may disagree profoundly with one another, but they can still be united by the belief that something worse stands outside the coalition.
For a time, that strategy works. But it does not resolve the contradictions. It merely postpones them.
Juggle the causes, one by one,
Keep every grievance near the sun.
Women, religion, sex and creed—
Each with a claim, each with a need.
Higher and faster, never ask
Whether they fit the common task.
Smile for the crowd, deny the strain—
Catch what falls, then throw again.
But gravity waits. It always will.
The hands grow tired, the room grows still.
One ball drops, then two, then all—
No slogan can suspend the fall.
Governance requires something more difficult than declaring every fashionable cause mutually compatible. It requires choices.
Ireland’s political establishment cannot indefinitely keep every ball in the air while pretending that the balls never collide. Nor can uncomfortable questions always be dismissed by reaching for labels such as “far-right,” “bigoted” or “intolerant.”
A society can support religious freedom, but eventually it must decide where that freedom ends when it conflicts with animal welfare or women’s rights. It can recognise gender identity, but it must decide whether biological sex continues to matter in prisons and sport. It can celebrate multiculturalism, but it must decide whether cultural practices remain beyond criticism when they collide with liberal principles. It can champion LGBTQ+ rights while acknowledging that not every minority community shares liberal Western attitudes toward sexuality.
Those are not imaginary contradictions. They are the unavoidable consequences of pluralism. The real mistake is pretending that diversity means agreement. It does not.
Diversity means people with profoundly different beliefs living together. Governing such a society therefore requires drawing boundaries, ranking competing rights and occasionally telling one constituency that another principle takes precedence.
That is politics. The juggling act begins when politicians refuse to admit it. And sooner or later, gravity wins.