According to the CBC, Canada is rife with homophobic hate crimes. The evidence? Well, for starters, there was an anonymous guy who was recorded spitting on a rainbow crosswalk in St. John’s, because of course there was a rainbow crosswalk. Now, we don’t know who the guy is, or whether he opposes gay marriage, or if he just happened to spit on the ground and the ground was covered with a rainbow crosswalk and so now he looks like he blasphemed (during Pride Week, no less.) But there’s more, the CBC tells us—and that is why the anonymous guy spitting on the crosswalk is a microcosm of the hatred cropping up everywhere in Canada.
And it is parents who are insufficiently progressive on the LGBTQ issues who are the ones spreading the hate (the renegade spitter could very well have been one of them, when you really think about it.) For example in Middle Arm, Newfoundland, parents declined to attend “a talk about inclusion and acceptance at MSB Regional Academy” in April, with only 13 students showing up. The presentation was hosted by the Get Real Movement, an organization that travels Canada talking to students about LGBTQ inclusion, and supporters of the presentation found parental reactions disturbing. The CBC trawled Facebook for opposition and came up with this:
A thread shared publicly shows parents discussing their reasons for keeping their kids home from school for the presentation.
“I hope every family with any biblical morals will be keeping their kids home,” one parent wrote.
“I can promise you that I will not be allowing my children to attend this course,” wrote another. “I have no interest in allowing my children to become indoctrinated by the Liberal moral compass.”
“One of these days something bad will happen in OUR schools,” said another person. “[And] we’ll be all wondering where was God????”
You can see, I’m sure, why LGBT activists were so horrified: It turns out that there are Christians in Newfoundland, and that they have no desire to volunteer their children for presentations that conflict with their Christian worldview. This has caused the LGBT activists much grief, and has no doubt triggered strategy sessions discerning how best to reach the children of these backwards parents without their knowledge or consent. A new sex-ed curriculum, perhaps.
The CBC also noted that another indicator of homophobia was the decision of Springdale not to approve a Pride crosswalk earlier this year—the city council voted against it, with the mayor noting that the crosswalk would “cause division in the community and, as it supported a particular minority group, was not a good way to spend tax dollars.” This is obviously true—Springdale is a little Newfoundland town with a population just shy of 3,000, and quite a conservative one at that. But because the mayor refused to endorse an ideology that many of the voters oppose, we are told that Canada is a dangerous place for LGBT people.
The CBC then reminded readers that there have been examples of trucks squealing their tires or “vandalizing” rainbow sidewalks in some rural places in Canada, and noted sadly that private religious schools in Alberta want to teach their own curriculum without interference and that voters in Toronto do not want gender fluidity taught to their children. This is all evidence of ugly homophobia, says the CBC, and then immediately launched into a description of genuinely anti-gay crimes around the world, where people suffer real violence at the hands of people who really do hate them. The implication is obvious: If Christian parents in Canada are not stopped, no LGBT person is safe.
It is a sad irony that the author of this CBC screed does not realize that her column makes precisely the opposite case that she thinks it does. By presenting Christian parents as a threat to their own children and a threat to LGBT people in Canada simply because they have different religious views than she does, she is engaging in a savage smear—especially when she insinuates that there is some similarity between parental concerns about what is being taught in sex-ed classes and the brutal murder of a young boy near St. John’s eighteen years ago. To attempt to link these two things is repulsive, and it is slander.
But it is also, as we’ve seen over the past decade, precisely what the many religious communities in Canada can expect from LGBT activists so long as they refuse to whole-heartedly embrace the rainbow agenda, and dutifully send their children off to be educated by those who despise their values and call them hateful.
_______________________________________________
For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.
