Posts Tagged ‘glbt issues’
[URBAN NOTE] “Who will succeed Rae in riding that includes Toronto’s gaybourhood?”
Continuing on from the previous news item, Xtra!‘s Rob Salerno considers the fate of Bob Rae’s riding of Toronto Centre, a riding that includes–among other neighbourhoods–the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood.
Rae has represented Toronto Centre as a Liberal since 2008, when he won a by-election to succeed retiring Liberal MP Bill Graham. He twice had hopes to win the federal party leadership dashed, in 2006 and again in 2008, following the resignation of Stéphane Dion and the installation of Michael Ignatieff as leader. He helmed the Liberal Party after Ignatieff lost his own seat in the 2011 election until Justin Trudeau was elected party leader this April.
Despite huge growth in the NDP vote in 2011, Toronto Centre has been considered one of the few safe Liberal seats remaining in the country, and party activists are saying they will fight hard to keep it in the fold.
Many Liberals are saying that the nomination battle is George Smitherman’s to lose. Smitherman, who is openly gay, represented the riding provincially from 1999 to 2010, when he resigned to launch his failed bid for mayor of Toronto. Smitherman says he is considering running but hasn’t made a firm decision yet.
“It’s certainly been the case that Christopher [Peloso, his husband] and I have been thinking of a return to politics at a national level, and the implications on our family,” Smitherman says. “It’s a lot like the opportunity when I began to run in 1998, to play a role in chasing Mike Harris out of Ontario. I look forward to the opportunity to chase Stephen Harper out of Ottawa.”
Other names being mentioned as possible candidates for the nomination include Pascal Dessureault, who is chair of the 519 Church Street Community Centre and a former member of the board of the Liberal Party’s Quebec wing, and political columnist Zach Paikin. Both acknowledge that they’ve considered running at some time, but neither would confirm that they’re interested in Rae’s seat.
[URBAN NOTE] “Piecing together the story of three missing men from Toronto’s gay village”
Andrea Houston’s Xtra! article noting the disappearance of three queer men of South Asian heritage over the past several years from the Church and Wellesley area–Skandaraj “Skanda” Navaratnam, Abdulbasir “Basir” Faizi, and Majeed “Hamid” Kayhan–makes for worrisome, and sad, reading. While Navaratnam was out, Faizi and Kayhan were both married heterosexually with children, in the closet. This may have left the latter two vulnerable.
Being “out-ish,” especially for some new Canadians, is not uncommon. People who come to Canada from homophobic countries often take years to venture out of the closet, if they ever do, he says. “It’s all part of the process,” he adds.
Faizi has a similar family situation to Kayhan. His sister-in-law Nijiba tells Xtra that his family is very worried. She knew nothing about the connection to the Village. She says Faizi has a wife and two daughters who live in Mississauga.
[. . .]
Harris says police have done an extensive background search on Navaratnam, including accessing “numerous judicial authorizations” to try to determine his whereabouts, such as immigration, but have discovered no leads from that.
“The key connection for us is that all three disappeared from the Church and Wellesley area, they have family and friends who are concerned about them, and everything that we’ve done from the onset, there is nothing that tells us where these three people are,” she says.
[. . . El-Farouk] Khaki says police should continue to expand the search by looking at cold cases and outstanding missing-person reports, in Toronto areas outside the Village and beyond. If these three men are indeed connected, Khaki says, it’s important for investigators to understand the cultural sensitivities and discrimination that explain why men like Kayhan and Faizi live double lives. With that in mind, it’s possible other missing-persons cases could be connected as well.
“I don’t think it’s problematic that police are looking at all possibilities, but I think they need to cast their net a little bit wider,” he says. “Start looking to see if other people have been reported missing from other areas. If there’s people connected to this community and also living closeted lives, the person who reports them missing could change how it is investigated.”
[LINK] “The gay people against gay marriage”
BBC News’ Tom Geoghegan writes about GLBT people uninterested in equal marriage rights. According to Geoghegan, these people fall in two categories: GLBT people who think that marriage is purely heterosexual and that other legal constructions, like civil unions, are adequate; and, GLBT people who think that marriage is inherently oppressive.
Jonathan Soroff lives in liberal Massachusetts with his male partner, Sam. He doesn’t fit the common stereotype of an opponent of gay marriage.
But like half of his friends, he does not believe that couples of the same gender should marry.
“We’re not going to procreate as a couple and while the desire to demonstrate commitment might be laudable, the religious traditions that have accommodated same-sex couples have had to do some fairly major contortions,” says Soroff.
Until the federal government recognises and codifies the same rights for same-sex couples as straight ones, equality is the goal so why get hung up on a word, he asks.
“I’m not going to walk down the aisle to Mendelssohn wearing white in a church and throw a bouquet and do the first dance,” adds Soroff, columnist for the Improper Boston.
“I’ve been to some lovely gay weddings but aping the traditional heterosexual wedding is weird and I don’t understand why anyone wants to do that.
[LINK] “Gay marriage turns 10″
Xtra!‘s Matthew DiMera writes about the upcoming tenth anniversary of same-sex marriage in Canada. What has changed? DiMera visits different couples, talking about their experiences, allowing them to suggest that same-sex marriage opened up new possibilities for the general recognition of GLBT relationships.
[S]ame-sex marriage in Canada is no longer the hot-button topic it once was. In July 2005, the federal government passed the Civil Marriage Act, legalizing marriage for all Canadians, regardless of their sexual orientations.
Since then, the number of married same-sex couples has climbed dramatically.
The 2011 Canadian census counted 64,575 same-sex couples: 21,015 married and 43,560 common-law. Fifty-five percent of the couples were male. Of the married couples, 3,442 lived in BC and 8,372 lived in Ontario.
Since 2006, the number of married same-sex couples has almost tripled, while common-law couples have risen only 15 percent.
According to those same statistics, 0.8 percent of all couples (common-law and married) are in same-sex relationships.
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
- Centauri Dreams notes that exoplanet discovery of late is still limited.
- Crooked Timber’s Maria Farrell, as wife of a British soldier, opposes the latest initiative of the British panopticon state aimed at protecting soldiers.
- Daniel Drezner thinks that Michelle Obama should have met her Chinese counterpart.
- Eastern Approaches covers the floods in Germany and the Czech Republic.
- The Everyday Sociology Blog examines the question of the Boy Scouts of America and sexual orientation.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the case that the United States has become the energy colony of Canada (more specifically, Alberta).
- Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle considers whether gardeners should pick seeds or seedlings. It depends on their plans and experience.
- Towleroad maps the global acceptance of homosexuality based on a recent survey.
- Window on Eurasia suggests Siberian alienation from Russia, specifically in the Russian Far East, is growing.
[LINK] “How Boston powered the gay rights movement”
I’d read of Boston’s role as an intellectual hub in Edmund White‘s early 1980s States of Desire, but Leon Neyfakh‘s Boston Globe article is the first article I’ve come across which explicitly references that past. Fascinating reading, this.
When most Americans think about the story of gay rights, they look back to New York’s 1969 Stonewall Riots, when gay men in Greenwich Village rose up in response to a police raid and sparked a decade of determined activism. They remember San Francisco’s Harvey Milk, the charismatic leader from the Castro who was elected to the city’s Board of Supervisors in 1977 before being tragically assassinated. Perhaps they remember the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights of 1979, when around 100,000 people from around the country gathered in the capitol to demand an end to discrimination.
Conspicuously absent in that story is Boston, a city more likely to be associated with its Puritanical past than with gay activism. But while it routinely gets overshadowed by New York and San Francisco, where the gay scenes were bigger, louder, and livelier, a closer look at the movement’s early history and tactics reveals that Boston in the 1970s was deeply important in the arrival of gay rights as a mainstream national issue, and home to a sophisticated, nationally relevant, pioneering gay community. The cause of gay liberation was taken up during those years with energy and seriousness by Boston-area college students, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, psychiatrists, and lawyers. Ultimately, the city would be the source for a significant portion of the national movement’s burgeoning intellectual firepower.
[. . . ]
The city served as a farm team for gay-rights forces across the United States—thanks in part to Gay Community News, an influential weekly newspaper with national reach that was considered the movement’s “paper of record” throughout the ’70s, and whose alumni at one point occupied so many leadership roles around the country that they were called the “GCN mafia.” Boston also helped drive the movement’s political and legal development: Not only was it home to the country’s first openly gay state representative, Elaine Noble, it was also one of the first places in the country where antidiscrimination laws were brought up for debate by politicians, and the birthplace of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, known as GLAD, whose legal advocacy led to Massachusetts’ groundbreaking gay-marriage decision.
Part of what made the city distinctive in the ’70s was that the gay community, though active, just wasn’t that big, and thus was unusually harmonious. Gay men worked side by side with lesbians—uncommon at the time—and radical gay liberationists found common cause with moderates who believed in working for political reform. But the fact that this compact scene was devoted to advances on the political, intellectual, legal, and journalistic fronts—rather than becoming known for protests or a vibrant gay social scene—meant that Boston’s role in gay life never captured the imagination as did New York and San Francisco. To look back at what was forged in Boston is to realize that sometimes the forces that drive real social change are, on the surface, less dramatic than the transformative moments and individual leaders that come to symbolize it.
“New York was sexier. San Francisco was really sexy. But Boston was smarter,” said Michael Bronski, a professor at Harvard University who spent the 1970s writing for local gay publications and is the author of “A Queer History of the United States.” “Boston really generated ideas.”
[URBAN NOTE] “Why Pride Matters”
Wonkman blogs about why it matters that Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford has refused, for a third year, to attend Toronto Pride. A decade ago, when GLBT rights were that much less mainstream, suburban conservative Mel Lastman went.
Mel went because he was a tremendous baby-kisser. Mel was never happier than when he was shaking hands and meeting new people and mixing with his constituents. Parades and street festivals were incredible fun.
But more importantly, Mel went because Mel recognized that he was mayor of the entire city.
Not just the parts which voted for him, and not just the parts which he found appealing.
One of Mel’s main goals as mayor was to bring the city together: to promote inclusiveness and mutual understanding, to promote and protect minority cultures, to foster an environment where people from all over the world can feel at home.
And if occasionally he had to something he found distasteful or uncomfortable to reach that goal? Mel would pull on his big-boy pants and get it over with.
[. . .]
This was one of the pivotal moments in Mel’s career as mayor. It set the tone for the rest of his term in office. It was a moment when he proved something important to his constituents: all that talk about “inclusiveness” and “mayor of the whole city” was more than just idle political chatter. He was going to put himself out there, he was going to make a good-faith effort to engage with minority cultures on their own terms, and he was going to use his power as mayor to encourage the values he espoused, rather than cynically ditching them after election night.
Mel was not a perfect mayor—but he got this part right. No matter what you thought about his politics and his policies, we all knew that he genuinely loved this city and its people. It’s part of why he absolutely roared to victory in the 2000 mayoral election.
Mel started with a city split nearly in two along ideological and geographic lines, and he turned it into a unified, cohesive and coherent metropolis. He healed the rifts which he himself had inadvertently created. And he left the city more united, more even and more inclusive than he’d found it.
Would that Ford was a tenth of Lastman.
[LINK] “Assessing the Case Against Gay Marriage”
Over at the libertarian Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin finds arguments against same-sex marriage to be insufficient. If you ban same-sex marriage on grounds of poor outcomes, then why not ban other marriages with similar outcomes? (Sexual orientation alone isn’t sufficiently impressive.)
Gays and lesbians are only about 3-4 percent of the population, according to most surveys, and few heterosexuals look upon them as role models for how to manage their own marriages and sexual relationships. Even if we assume that most gay and lesbian marriages will set a poor example for heterosexuals, by e.g., promoting the idea that promiscuity is unobjectionable, or by being bad parents to their children, there is no reason to believe that heterosexuals will actually follow that example. If we assume, more realistically, that at worst same-sex marriages will be on average moderately worse than the heterosexual ones, but there will be great variation within each group, then the likelihood of a negative influence is even smaller. Even if you believe that raising children is the only good justification for marriage, many gays and lesbians are in fact raising children, and get married in large part for that reason. Most heterosexuals who don’t follow the subject closely probably won’t even know the data on the relative quality of same-sex marriages, much less model their own behavior on it. I don’t mean to suggest that same-sex marriages really are, on average, worse than heterosexual ones. But even if that is in fact the case, it is unlikely that heterosexual marriage will be much affected as a result.
In practice, the existence of gay marriage is likely to have only a very modest effect on the vast majority of heterosexuals. Because it involves such a small group, the introduction of gay marriage is actually a far less consequential social change than the legalization of interfaith marriage and interracial marriage, and the replacement of traditional patriarchal marriage that concentrated legal authority in the hands of the husband with a system where men and women have equal rights. Each of these were much more radical changes that affected large parts of society.
But if we nonetheless believe that the possibility of negative example effects is a good reason to ban same-sex marriage, it’s an even better reason to ban the much larger number of heterosexual marriages that involve people who are statistically likely to set a poor example for others. Such factors as poverty, low intelligence, a history of criminal behavior, and so forth are all highly correlated with social dysfunction within marriage, such as promiscuity and child and spousal abuse. And the number of heterosexuals who fall into these categories is far larger than the number of gays and lesbians. Dysfunctional heterosexual marriages are far more likely to have a negative effect on social mores than dysfunctional same-sex marriages. Yet almost no one claims that we should therefore ban poor people, people with low intelligence, or even criminals from getting married.
The post is worth reading at length. The comments, are, too, particularly this exchange.
