Just because most Conservatives don't approve of gay marriage doesn't mean they are homophobic. My mother and father don't agree with same sex marriage but have been supportive of gay rights and equality for over 40 years and would stick their nose out to prove it. They are anything but homophobic.
Newsflash: courts across the country agree that same-sex marriage is a right under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. To take it away would mean invoking the notwithstanding clause. I would consider anyone who would be willing to target a minority group in such a way to be pretty homophobic. Why are we even discussing SSM in this thread? Most Canadians have put the issue behind them (as it looks like the federal government has for the time being, but that's what we all thought about their stance on abortion...).
This actually made me laugh out loud. Harper is full of fear. Just look at the $1,000,000,000 pricetag on G8/G20 security. Look at the utter disdain he hurls at the press. Look at the way he stifles criticism. A confident and fearless leader would have no need to do such things. Harper's obsessive need to control the message leads me to believe he is incredibly fearful.
He doesn't agree with same sex marriage but outside of that he couldn't care less.
These so called leaders {like anyone voted into office to speak on behave of people of the LGBT community} call everything that mildly offends them as homophobic. It both absurd and childish. They reinvented the word "queer" which 99% of gay people would do anything but call themselves queer.
It's like anything else, it's pure politics. Sending money where you are hoping to reap the most political reward is a time honoured tradition that all political parties in Canada have long embraced. Federally the Liberals have it down to an artform and the Conservatives are just learning by example.
Where to start here? First of all, taking money away from pride is not, in and of itself, a mark of homophobia. The fact though that there was a huge backlash against federal funding last year from pretty homophobic people who didn't want their hard-earned tax dollars going to Queers in Toronto raises suspicion, perfectly valid suspicion in my mind. There are many members of the Conservative caucus and cabinet who have shown themselves time and time again to be homophobic, even within your narrow definition of the term (take Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski's remark that "There's A's and there's B's. The A's are guys like me, the B's are homosexual faggots with dirt on their fingernails that transmit diseases.") When these people are in government, and the government takes funding away from the country's biggest gay/Queer oriented event, questions are bound to pop up.
As for the word Queer, as a gay man who knows a lot of other gay people, the amount of us who have problems with the word are in the minority (at least amongst the people I know, which may be slightly biased to the younger and more academic crowd). The word goes beyond gay, including many other identities, some which are only related at all to being gay by the Queerness the wider world assigns them. Queer is an inclusive term that saves those of us who like being inclusive from those ridiculously long acronyms (Queer is much less of a mouthful than LGBT, not to mention its elongated forms).
I don't really know where this Nazi stuff is coming from. We've heard the words "biggot" and "Apartheid" in this thread, but that's a big stretch to Nazi. We're all well aware of what the Nazis did, and it's a general rule of thumb that we do not invoke such extreme rhetoric lest we somehow drag the victims of that regime into discussion to further or own point.
(I was debating with myself whether to post this next comment. So far this thread has steered relatively clear of the whole QuAIA debacle, and I would hate to be the one to ruin it, but I've decided it's appropriate given the shift of tone over the last few posts.) Generally, I would say the same thing about the word Apartheid, but considering the fact that leaders of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa have come out and embraced the word as an accurate depiction of Israeli policy regarding the Palestinian population, I don't have a problem with it's use in this context.
