The Written Word
for April 2, 2000

I’ve been taking a fair pounding lately for an interview I did with Stockwell Day, which was followed by a none too flattering editorial. And the main point of my sin seems to be the answer I elicited from him about homosexuality where he stated that this was a matter of choice. The fact is it isn’t – certainly not in the vast number of cases and I was and remain astonished that he thinks so. One email even accused me, in spite of my impressive record to the contrary, of being a closet homosexual.

Why was Mr Day’s answer important?

Well, you wouldn’t think it would be were it not for the fury the subject is causing especially, for reasons that mystify me, in Surrey. There are, quite clearly, a very large number of people who will be impressed by any politician that denounces homosexuality as a sin – and this is precisely what Mr Day, by the thinnest of implications, does. He didn’t say that homosexuality was irrelevant … he didn’t say that it was something of a private nature left best to individuals. No, he said that it was a choice and went on to make a stirring defence of the family which is the second button to push when attracting those who set their hair afire over homosexuality.

Clearly there is a very strong homophobic backlash out there to the flagrancy by which homosexuals have, over the past quarter century, "come out." When it was the sin that "dared not speak its name" and was all nicely hush hush, homophobia, while very much there, was suppressed. These were the days, after all, when consensual heterosexual anal and oral sex were punishable by prison. "Natural" sex, which is to say the missionary method, reigned supreme and everyone saved "it" for marriage.

Of course everyone did not and all manner of sex acts abounded. It was just that one could feel superior if one pretended that they never sinned.

But Pierre Trudeau, in 1967, said that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation and it was all downhill from there. We had same sex "palimony" where one same sex partner could sue the other for the equivalent of alimony. And, of course, we had Gay Pride parades, which became so outrageous that most people just chuckled but where others railed against the public sinning. When teachers, surveying their classrooms, saw intolerance based upon ignorance, and tried to tell kids that some children did indeed have two daddies or two mummies, some parents got very angry. They were convinced there was a "gay" agenda and that there was a movement afoot to seduce their children into a lifestyle they didn’t approve of and that the teachers were all behind the idea.

Enter the likes of Preston Manning and Stockwell Day – not to lead the charge against these terrible gay lifestyle proselytizing teachers but to pluck up the political plums there for the asking. There was nothing for these far right Christian politicians to do – they didn’t have to get into the fight. All they had to do was mumble phrases like "family values" and the word was out.

I don’t like guilt by association but feel bound to point out that the link is there to the Moral Majority once led by Jerry Falwell who was, in addition to being against all sin, especially of the homosexual variety, a believer in the world wide Jewish conspiracy. This doesn’t make Manning or Day anti-Semitic and I don’t believe they are. But it does tell you what sort of people will support these men and the party they lead. And for those of us who have placed a lot of faith in the promises by the Reform Party that they will truly reform government, this gives a lot of cause for thought.