Separate but unequal
Monday, 27 June 2005
Mark Steyn
How many gays does it take to change a light bulb?
Oh, good heavens, we don’t expect him actually to change the light bulb. All he has to do is hold it up on the lawn at Queen’s Park, while another gay waves a placard saying “DON’T LEAVE CANADA IN THE DARK AGES,” and that should pretty much do it. Two’s company, but two gays are a crowd, at least when it comes to public protests. Stick a couple of gays in a public place courageously demonstrating against our oppressive homophobic society, and we in the media will be over with the cameras and buzzing like moths around a flamer.
So it was that on Victoria Day eight gays held a protest outside the Ontario legislature calling for “Equal Rights, Equal Marriage.” The Globe and Mail ran a picture of the “protest” above the curious headline “Same-Sex Rallies,” presumably on the principle that, if more than three gays are present, it must count as multiple rallies. The gays were all cuddled up together, so the photograph provided an excellent shot of great vacant swathes of grass, the tree in the background, surrounding buildings, etc.
Meanwhile, a few yards away were several thousand people. Unfortunately for them, they weren’t gay, so they didn’t get their picture in The Globe and Mail. Instead, they were calling for the preservation of traditional marriage, and there were only an estimated 10,000 or so. So there were, sadly, too many to fit in a photo and, although The Globe sent along a reporter, his story got spiked.
How many anti-gay-marriage types does it take to change a light bulb?
Oh, at least 30,000, and even then The Grace and Will--sorry, Globe and Male will only run it on page D27, at the foot of the gay bathhouse classifieds.
There’s an old, cynical formula for the weight accorded different natural disasters on TV news. It runs something like: one dead American = 10 dead Israelis = 100 dead Russians = 1,000 dead Bangladeshis. But in the ongoing unnatural disaster of our Dominion we now seem to be applying a similar scale to more and less favoured demographics in the glorious Canadian mosaic. One protesting gay = 10 protesting natives = 100 protesting Muslims = 100,000 protesting scary right-wing religious rednecks. All Canadians are equal but some Canadians are more equal than others. At The Globe and Mail they’ve modified Orwell: 20,000 legs--bad; 16 legs--cute and hot, unless two of them belong to Joe Clark under the misapprehension that it’s the Calgary Gay Pride march come round again, and he’s dusted off the tight leather pants with cutaway buttocks one more time.
Forget the merits or otherwise of “gay marriage.” That’s hardly an issue. Even gays aren’t fired up about it. Mitchel Raphael, editor-in-chief of Fab, “the gay scene magazine,” told the National Post that the reason the “same-sex rallies” attracted fewer gays than an overweight bear cruising the twinks at a Boystown bar was that gay marriage was “such a done deal, and people don’t care. The gay rights movement is a handful of lawyers in Ottawa working for this bill.” But that’s all it takes: in Canadian math, a handful of activist gay lawyers outnumber the 59–66 per cent of Canadians neanderthal enough to want to preserve marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The separate-but-unequal principle is hardwired into the Canadian body politic. In the House of Commons, it requires far fewer voters to elect a Quebecer than an Albertan, and from that basic inequity in democratic representation flow many slyer ones. It was said at the height of Adscam fever that the reason it never quite took off with the Canadian people was that in the Rest Of Canada the anglos had a hard time keeping track of all the francophone names--Benoît Corbeil, Charles Guité, Huguette Tremblay, Michel Tremblay, Jean Brault, Alain Renauld, Jacques Corriveau, Charles Renaud, Michel Brault, Huguette Corriveau, Corbeil Tremblay, Jean-Pierre Brault, Jean-Michel Corriveau, Pierre-Michel Renauld . . . Anglophones weren’t quite saying all these French guys look alike to ’em, only that they do sorta blur together when they’re all yakking about how many millions Jean-Alain gave them to award a contract to Jean-Charles’ agency for work it never did for Jean-Benoît’s department, until the entire scandal begins to sound like the Montreal phone directory punctuated only by the occasional Gagliano “associate” threatening to whack someone.
But that’s the point. The tonal consistency of the nomenclature was at least as revealing as any of the specifics about the perverse concentration of power: if the Liberals are Canada’s Baath Party, Quebec is the Sunni Triangle, and the ROC is the dispossessed Shia majority. Who can doubt that when the first Gay-Governor-General moves into Rideau Hall he’ll be a Québécois?
These privileged castes are not fixed in stone. New ones come, old ones go. At that pro-marriage rally The Globe didn’t think worth covering, Masood Khan of the United Front for Pakistani Muslims, declared, “On behalf of over one million Muslims in Canada, I can assure you: we will not accept this crap.” Sorry, old boy. If you’d said “we will not accept this crap” about ethnic profiling at the Windsor/Detroit border, or Guantanamo interrogators “desecrating” the Koran, or Stephen Harper giving off a vaguely Islamophobic air, we in the media would be behind you all the way. But for the moment homophobia still outranks Islamophobia, so Muslims, a protected class in all other respects, join the Christian right at the back of the bus when the subject turns to gays. I doubt whether they’ll “accept this crap” for long. But, though the internal contradictions of multiculturalism might seem irreconcilable, the core premise of Trudeaupia is that the state functions as the principal arbiter between different identity groups, and I would imagine the Liberals rather relish the long-term challenge of warming up Mr. Khan and his one million coreligionists to the virtues of gay marriage. Or, to put it crudely, they’re confident at least that they can provide enough incentives to a key constituency to prevent them wandering off the reservation. Muslims are supposedly “culturally conservative,” but in the last election only one per cent of them voted Tory.
But what about those groups who have zero prospect of ever finding a place in the Trudeaupian pantheon? Unlike the phony-baloney dance of the eternal “national unity” bluff, between Quebec separatists and Canadian Liberals who agree on absolutely everything, there are serious differences between Alberta and Ottawa. Yet, unlike the “national unity” charade, the Alberta/Ottawa disunity is irrelevant to Canada’s political dynamic, and likely to remain so. Are Albertans content to remain bystanders in the national debate forever?
How about Christians? Practicing Christians, that is--not the vague heritage-Catholicism of the Quebec establishment, where the approved model is M. Trudeau, who didn’t become a practicing Catholic until the funeral. The formal godlessness of modern Canada only became apparent to me after 9/11, as I sat through that ghastly hollow thingummy--mustn’t call it a “service”--on Parliament Hill waiting for someone to put in a passing reference to the deity. In Washington, London and elsewhere, they were cool with God. But in the official life of the Canadian state He’s now as invisible as pro-marriage demonstrators in The Globe and Mail. Christians in Canada already face a climate of sustained judicial and quasi-judicial hostility, where a B.C. teacher can be suspended for writing in an individual capacity in the local newspaper that “homosexuality is not something to be applauded.” Oh, yes it is, and, if you’re not applauding it, you better have a damn good reason--like, say, you had your hands chopped off after you were arrested in a Saudi gay bar. In Canada, “tolerance” is now a euphemism for intolerance. Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage, they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. But increasingly gays oppose the right of Christians to advocate their beliefs at all. Activists have figured that instead of trying to persuade people to change their opinions, it’s easier just to get them banned. Hence, light-fingered Svend’s heavy-handed bill--with doubtless more to follow.
A lot of this is crudely effective. Greg Weston began his Sun column the other day thus: “On the evening of Paul Martin’s televised grovel to the nation last month, Stephen Harper stepped up to the microphone, scowled into the camera, and proceeded to scare the living hell out of voters from sea to sea.”
Oh, phooey. I doubt you could find one voter from sea to sea who genuinely had the living hell “scared” out of him. But, even as Conservatives scramble ever more frantically to be “moderate” and thus media-approved, the epithet “scary” clings to them like a barnacle on a sinking ship. They ought to make it part of their name: the Scary Conservative Party or, for Red Tories, the Progressive Scary Conservative Party. “Scary” is code--a way of tying Harper and Tories to God and guns, to the religious and to the West.
Given that you’re going to be damned as “scary” anyway, you might as well do something that really scares them--like give serious consideration to Alberta’s place in Confederation. All Canadians are equal but some Canadians are getting less and less equal every day, with no end in sight.
Monday, 27 June 2005
Mark Steyn
How many gays does it take to change a light bulb?
Oh, good heavens, we don’t expect him actually to change the light bulb. All he has to do is hold it up on the lawn at Queen’s Park, while another gay waves a placard saying “DON’T LEAVE CANADA IN THE DARK AGES,” and that should pretty much do it. Two’s company, but two gays are a crowd, at least when it comes to public protests. Stick a couple of gays in a public place courageously demonstrating against our oppressive homophobic society, and we in the media will be over with the cameras and buzzing like moths around a flamer.
So it was that on Victoria Day eight gays held a protest outside the Ontario legislature calling for “Equal Rights, Equal Marriage.” The Globe and Mail ran a picture of the “protest” above the curious headline “Same-Sex Rallies,” presumably on the principle that, if more than three gays are present, it must count as multiple rallies. The gays were all cuddled up together, so the photograph provided an excellent shot of great vacant swathes of grass, the tree in the background, surrounding buildings, etc.
Meanwhile, a few yards away were several thousand people. Unfortunately for them, they weren’t gay, so they didn’t get their picture in The Globe and Mail. Instead, they were calling for the preservation of traditional marriage, and there were only an estimated 10,000 or so. So there were, sadly, too many to fit in a photo and, although The Globe sent along a reporter, his story got spiked.
How many anti-gay-marriage types does it take to change a light bulb?
Oh, at least 30,000, and even then The Grace and Will--sorry, Globe and Male will only run it on page D27, at the foot of the gay bathhouse classifieds.
There’s an old, cynical formula for the weight accorded different natural disasters on TV news. It runs something like: one dead American = 10 dead Israelis = 100 dead Russians = 1,000 dead Bangladeshis. But in the ongoing unnatural disaster of our Dominion we now seem to be applying a similar scale to more and less favoured demographics in the glorious Canadian mosaic. One protesting gay = 10 protesting natives = 100 protesting Muslims = 100,000 protesting scary right-wing religious rednecks. All Canadians are equal but some Canadians are more equal than others. At The Globe and Mail they’ve modified Orwell: 20,000 legs--bad; 16 legs--cute and hot, unless two of them belong to Joe Clark under the misapprehension that it’s the Calgary Gay Pride march come round again, and he’s dusted off the tight leather pants with cutaway buttocks one more time.
Forget the merits or otherwise of “gay marriage.” That’s hardly an issue. Even gays aren’t fired up about it. Mitchel Raphael, editor-in-chief of Fab, “the gay scene magazine,” told the National Post that the reason the “same-sex rallies” attracted fewer gays than an overweight bear cruising the twinks at a Boystown bar was that gay marriage was “such a done deal, and people don’t care. The gay rights movement is a handful of lawyers in Ottawa working for this bill.” But that’s all it takes: in Canadian math, a handful of activist gay lawyers outnumber the 59–66 per cent of Canadians neanderthal enough to want to preserve marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The separate-but-unequal principle is hardwired into the Canadian body politic. In the House of Commons, it requires far fewer voters to elect a Quebecer than an Albertan, and from that basic inequity in democratic representation flow many slyer ones. It was said at the height of Adscam fever that the reason it never quite took off with the Canadian people was that in the Rest Of Canada the anglos had a hard time keeping track of all the francophone names--Benoît Corbeil, Charles Guité, Huguette Tremblay, Michel Tremblay, Jean Brault, Alain Renauld, Jacques Corriveau, Charles Renaud, Michel Brault, Huguette Corriveau, Corbeil Tremblay, Jean-Pierre Brault, Jean-Michel Corriveau, Pierre-Michel Renauld . . . Anglophones weren’t quite saying all these French guys look alike to ’em, only that they do sorta blur together when they’re all yakking about how many millions Jean-Alain gave them to award a contract to Jean-Charles’ agency for work it never did for Jean-Benoît’s department, until the entire scandal begins to sound like the Montreal phone directory punctuated only by the occasional Gagliano “associate” threatening to whack someone.
But that’s the point. The tonal consistency of the nomenclature was at least as revealing as any of the specifics about the perverse concentration of power: if the Liberals are Canada’s Baath Party, Quebec is the Sunni Triangle, and the ROC is the dispossessed Shia majority. Who can doubt that when the first Gay-Governor-General moves into Rideau Hall he’ll be a Québécois?
These privileged castes are not fixed in stone. New ones come, old ones go. At that pro-marriage rally The Globe didn’t think worth covering, Masood Khan of the United Front for Pakistani Muslims, declared, “On behalf of over one million Muslims in Canada, I can assure you: we will not accept this crap.” Sorry, old boy. If you’d said “we will not accept this crap” about ethnic profiling at the Windsor/Detroit border, or Guantanamo interrogators “desecrating” the Koran, or Stephen Harper giving off a vaguely Islamophobic air, we in the media would be behind you all the way. But for the moment homophobia still outranks Islamophobia, so Muslims, a protected class in all other respects, join the Christian right at the back of the bus when the subject turns to gays. I doubt whether they’ll “accept this crap” for long. But, though the internal contradictions of multiculturalism might seem irreconcilable, the core premise of Trudeaupia is that the state functions as the principal arbiter between different identity groups, and I would imagine the Liberals rather relish the long-term challenge of warming up Mr. Khan and his one million coreligionists to the virtues of gay marriage. Or, to put it crudely, they’re confident at least that they can provide enough incentives to a key constituency to prevent them wandering off the reservation. Muslims are supposedly “culturally conservative,” but in the last election only one per cent of them voted Tory.
But what about those groups who have zero prospect of ever finding a place in the Trudeaupian pantheon? Unlike the phony-baloney dance of the eternal “national unity” bluff, between Quebec separatists and Canadian Liberals who agree on absolutely everything, there are serious differences between Alberta and Ottawa. Yet, unlike the “national unity” charade, the Alberta/Ottawa disunity is irrelevant to Canada’s political dynamic, and likely to remain so. Are Albertans content to remain bystanders in the national debate forever?
How about Christians? Practicing Christians, that is--not the vague heritage-Catholicism of the Quebec establishment, where the approved model is M. Trudeau, who didn’t become a practicing Catholic until the funeral. The formal godlessness of modern Canada only became apparent to me after 9/11, as I sat through that ghastly hollow thingummy--mustn’t call it a “service”--on Parliament Hill waiting for someone to put in a passing reference to the deity. In Washington, London and elsewhere, they were cool with God. But in the official life of the Canadian state He’s now as invisible as pro-marriage demonstrators in The Globe and Mail. Christians in Canada already face a climate of sustained judicial and quasi-judicial hostility, where a B.C. teacher can be suspended for writing in an individual capacity in the local newspaper that “homosexuality is not something to be applauded.” Oh, yes it is, and, if you’re not applauding it, you better have a damn good reason--like, say, you had your hands chopped off after you were arrested in a Saudi gay bar. In Canada, “tolerance” is now a euphemism for intolerance. Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage, they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. But increasingly gays oppose the right of Christians to advocate their beliefs at all. Activists have figured that instead of trying to persuade people to change their opinions, it’s easier just to get them banned. Hence, light-fingered Svend’s heavy-handed bill--with doubtless more to follow.
A lot of this is crudely effective. Greg Weston began his Sun column the other day thus: “On the evening of Paul Martin’s televised grovel to the nation last month, Stephen Harper stepped up to the microphone, scowled into the camera, and proceeded to scare the living hell out of voters from sea to sea.”
Oh, phooey. I doubt you could find one voter from sea to sea who genuinely had the living hell “scared” out of him. But, even as Conservatives scramble ever more frantically to be “moderate” and thus media-approved, the epithet “scary” clings to them like a barnacle on a sinking ship. They ought to make it part of their name: the Scary Conservative Party or, for Red Tories, the Progressive Scary Conservative Party. “Scary” is code--a way of tying Harper and Tories to God and guns, to the religious and to the West.
Given that you’re going to be damned as “scary” anyway, you might as well do something that really scares them--like give serious consideration to Alberta’s place in Confederation. All Canadians are equal but some Canadians are getting less and less equal every day, with no end in sight.
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