The other tendency is represented by Mr Vriend, the human rights commissions and the courts of Canada. It believes that municipalities should be compelled to lend official support to gay pride days, that religious colleges should be compelled to hire people whose behaviour they consider an abomination before God, and that a spouse is no more or less than (in the felicitous words of the Ontario Court of Appeal) someone you “designate” as such – husband, wife, gay partner or, presumably, the next-door neighbour or your favourite goldfish.
For its willingness to break up Canada on a 50-per-cent-plus-one vote, the Parizeau tendency is denounced as profoundly anti-democratic; for their willingness to break up ancient institutions such as the laws of marriage and contract on the basis of no social consensus whatsoever, the Vriend crowd are hailed as reasonable persons of a progressive tolerant bent. That’s why we’ll have gay marriage long before an independent Quebec: In Canada, it’s easier to come out than get out.
At which point, to avoid the attention of the human rights commission myself, I’d better issue the usual disclaimers: some of my best friends are gay; I’m entirely relaxed when it comes to penetrative sex with other men. Hang on, that didn’t come out quite right. Anyway, the point is being gay – in the modern, professional, litigious sense – is not primarily about penetrative sex with other men. Rather, it’s about the construction of a round-the-clock identity accorded special protection under the law. The courts and commissions do not extend this consideration to all groups. Quite the opposite. If, following Mr Vriend’s example, a devout Catholic were to get a job in a gay bathhouse and wander around the cubicles saying Hail Marys, he’d receive short shrift from Canadian justice. We all know that, in media commentary on the Supreme Court decision, “religious”, like “rural”, is code-speak for “bigot”.
In fact, these religious bigots are surprisingly tolerant. For example, I have before me a copy of the Easter edition of The Mirror, a Montreal weekly of vaguely leftish views and entertainment listings. On page three is an advertisement for Resurrection, “the queer dance event of Easter weekend”, featuring an oiled, muscular hunk, nude except for several phallic symbols over his washboard stomach and a neon cross over his crotch, his glistening thighs flanked by two urinals. This queer dance event was a benefit party for Montreal Queer Pride/Divers Cité 98, whose corporate sponsors proudly display their logos underneath the twinkling stud: Canadian Airlines, American Airlines, Glaxo Wellcome… In the diversified Dominion, we must be properly sensitive toward persons of colour, persons of orientation and persons of gender, but we can be sneeringly contemptuous of persons of faith, appropriating their most sacred imagery for the crassest of purposes even on the holiest day in the Christian calendar.
That was written a mere decade before my own tribulations, but we’ve come a long way since then. Of course, not all “persons of faith” get treated so disdainfully: Try putting Mohammed or the Muslim crescent next to a urinal in a Queer Pride poster, and a “human rights” complaint will be the least of your worries. Nevertheless, as interpreted by Canada’s “human rights” regime, “tolerance” is little more than fashion: gays are in, Christians are out – and ever more so. This is from The Western Standard of April 18th 2005:
So it’s no surprise to find that, even though we’ve only had legalized “same-sex marriage” for ten minutes, and even though Paul Martin & Co have given a lot of fine-sounding assurances on how the new arrangements will respect the deeply held beliefs of ancient religions, gays are already in court suing for the right to marry on church property. In 2003, the Knights of Columbus in Port Coquitlam accepted a booking for a wedding reception in their hall behind Our Lady of the Assumption Church. It’s a fairly typical Knights of Columbus hall – crucifixes, photographs of the Pope, paintings of the Virgin Mary, etc. When the Knights discovered that Deborah Chymyshyn and Tracey Smith were, in fact, a lesbian couple, they cancelled the booking as politely as they could under the circumstances, returning the deposit and, on the advice of the Archdiocese, chipping in a further $600 to cover new wedding invitations and an alternative location. The Misses Chymyshyn and Smith immediately went out and signed on with Barbara Findlay – or, to use her preferred style, barbara findlay. If you want to know why she rejects capital letters, you should attend one of her ‘unlearning oppression’ workshops. The point is, if you’re looking for a lower-case crusader who’ll get your lower case to a higher court, she’s the gal – the Queen’s Counsel who’s also BC’s most celebrated queens’ counsel, the lesbian activist who famously declared in 1997 that “the legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a showdown between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation”.
Right now, which would you plunk your chips on? A legal decision here, a legal decision there – a religious institution can’t fire a militantly gay employee, a religious school has to allow gay couples to the prom, the sterner admonitions from Leviticus can no longer be quoted in church advertising – and the ratchet effect is well underway…
If I could afford the liability coverage, I’d be happy to put up the dough for a lesbian couple to sue over the right to marry in an Islamic community centre – just to get a sense of how the Grits intend to resolve the internal contradictions of the multicultural society. But militant gays, like Quebec separatists and “abused” natives, know how to pick their targets.
I have a lot of respect for barbara findlay, QC (or qc). She’s admirably straightforward about what she wants and how she intends to get it. By contrast, the quiet lifers are deluding either themselves or us by persisting in the belief that one last retreat will do it and we can then draw a line. There is no bottom line – no line and no bottom, just an ongoing bumpy descent into a brave new world.
The proponents of that brave new world see it as a rainbow utopia of gay rights and women’s rights and ethnic rights enforced only at the expense of recalcitrant theocratic bigots. But in the Nineties a far more motivated and less easily demonized crowd of theocrats began making their presence felt in Canada and the west. And what I called multiculturalism’s internal contradictions became far harder to ignore…
THE BBC
Kilroy was here
LET ME SEE if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you’re Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11th – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.
But, if you’re Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers on the West Bank “should be shot dead” because “they are Nazis” and “I feel nothing but hatred for them”, the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London’s cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.