BILL C-38 VOTE
With the first vote on the government’s Equal Marriage Bill (C-38) set for this Tuesday, April 12, I’m writing to ask you to stand up for minority rights and vote AGAINST Stephen Harper’s motion.
I support equal marriage for same-sex couples and Mr. Harper’s motion would kill the equal marriage Bill.
Mr. Harper’s motion says the Bill should define marriage as one man and one woman. The only way for Parliament to do that is to use the notwithstanding clause to take away Charter protection.
A vote for Mr. Harper’s motion is a vote for the notwithstanding clause.
Parliament has never before used the notwithstanding clause. Doing so would threaten everyone’s Charter rights, not only the right to equality, but the right to free speech and freedom of religion as well. All of these rights can be taken away using the notwithstanding clause.
Please let me know if you intend to stand up for minority rights and vote against Mr. Harper’s motion.
April 10th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
In a rather long life — I am a Junior Geezer — from the playground to this moment, I have witnessed local, state and federal government and their law-enforcement agencies, and seemingly the bulk of my national culture, attack homosexuals as if they were Enemies of the State. Not a year of my life has gone by without some notorious example of homosexuals getting the crap bashed out of them, either legally or physically.
When I served in the US Army honorably as a draftee during the Vietnam War, everyone in the barracks, gay and straight, lived in constant terror because of the Army Secret Undercover Police constantly trying to catch homosexuals and destroy their life. To the CID, a homosexual soldier hanging himself in the barracks bathroom or in his cell in the stockade was a Good Outcome. (And still is, despite Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” non-solution.)
Until the 1980s, my Massachusetts State Police made regular raids on an Interstate-91 scenic parking lot that was a homosexual trysting place — as if adults wanting to have consentual physical intimacy required 6 state police cars and a SWAT team.
And of course the regular incidents of strangers bashing strangers on our streets, and later sheepishly explaining to the judge that they were raised by divine clergy and Sunday School teachers to hate queers. (The most recent incident in my downtown, it turned out the guy was drunk and his victim was actually straight. I guess his Holy Gadar was on the fritz.)
I have come to the conclusion that the entire ancient historical volume of official and amateur attacks against homosexuals has done nothing but make my nation and society weaker and weaker and sicker and sicker. If money is all you care about, we have grown poorer. If you care about Community, our Community is weaker and more feeble. If Patriotism and Homeland Security is all you care about, congratulations: Our country is more unsafe — because of all the military resources still being constantly diverted and devoted to catching queers.
When the anti-homosexuality laws were passed in Victorian Britain, everyone immediately nicknamed it “The Blackmailers’ Charter.” Near its end, it drove Alan Matheson Turing, the English codebreaker who broke the Nazi Enigma code and won the Battle of the North Atlantic for our side, to an early suicide; his judge forced him to have hormone injections, and he grew breasts. The thanks of a grateful nation.
I’m rather tired of it, and if it can’t stop, let me tell you about a place … I know lots of places that claim to be welcoming and tolerant of homosexuals.
But I only know one place that built a big-ass memorial statue and public park to them: Amsterdam.
Same-sex MARRIAGE has been fully legal in the Netherlands for about a decade, and my Lesbian pals raced there to live immediately after falling in love. Been there ever since, wouldn’t dream of leaving. To come back to the USA? Why on Earth would they want to do that?