When a bill concerning homosexual “rights” was introduced into the Ontario Legislature in 1986, its supporters were led by the most influential member of the Cabinet next to Premier Peterson – Attorney-General Ian Scott. They maintained that all they were trying to do was put an end to unfair discrimination.
But the bill was part of a “Gay Drive” – an international campaign to obtain special rights and privileges for homosexuals. The campaign strives to establish homosexual relationships as perfectly normal and acceptable, fully deserving of all the recognition and privileges extended to couples in marriage.
What has been the result of this gay drive so far?
Early in 1987, a Toronto bookstore challenged a National Revenue ruling that The Joy of Gay Sex should be prohibited from distribution in Canada. One of its authors, American psychologist Charles Silverstein, claimed that it was an educational guide and that information protects people. Its depictions of anal sex had been objected to, but, he said, that to have left such material out would have turned the book into a sham.
District Court Judge Bruce Hawkins, unfortunately, agreed with him. He ruled that the work was not obscene: “I find that the book deals rationally and unsensationally with the sexual practices of a substantial segment of the male population.” Then he added one of the most outrageous comparisons made by any judge in recent years: “However repugnant the concept of anal sex may be to the heterosexual observer, it is, I find, the central sexual act of homosexual practice. To write about homosexual practices without dealing with anal intercourse would be equivalent to writing a history of music and omitting Mozart.”
Pictures
It is important to notice what this ruling accomplished. First, is legitimized pornography: if pictures showing two males engaged in anal sex are within the bounds of acceptability, what can possibly be prohibited? Second, it made it seem that the study and promotion of sodomy (after all, the title of the book emphasized the joy of gay sex) was as neutral and harmless as the study and cultivation of the music of Mozart or Chopin.
Homosexual activity
In other words, we seemed to have moved from tolerance of homosexual activity between consulting adults to acceptance of what the homosexuals want – approval of homosexual relationships as a legitimate alternative lifestyle.
Not surprisingly, Ontario Ombudsman Daniel Hill, in his 1987 report to the Provincial Government, drew out one of the implications of this new outlook. He highlighted the case of a lesbian couple who wanted to pay the family rate for OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) premiums. In his opinion, they should have received this concession; he argued that a homosexual mate should receive the same work-related benefit as a heterosexual couple. The government’s policy of denying such a benefit seemed “dated and inappropriate” in view of recent changes to the Ontario Human Rights Code prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.
AIDS and interference
As the AIDS epidemic spreads, homosexuals continue to claim their rights and avoid whatever responsibility they have for the spread of the disease among each other and for the contamination of the blood supply (causing the death of entirely innocent victims). In his book And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts, himself a homosexual did blame the homosexuals for continuing to frequent bathhouses and engage in promiscuous sex even when the nature of the disease had become apparent; still, he blames the U.S. government for being slow to act and the general public for failing to discourage promiscuity by encouraging stable “conjugal” relationships among homosexuals.
One area of great controversy is how far public officials should go in “interfering” with the lives of AIDS victims in order to protect the public. Early in 1987, Dr. Richard Fralick of the Toronto Health Department said that provincial legislation allows officials to detain certain people for their own health and for the good of the community. He did not believe in any blanket incarceration for people with AIDS, but he pointed out that existing legislation allowed medical officers to issue an order to an infected person “to conduct himself in such a manner as not to expose another person to infection.”
Conference
Just before an AIDS symposium convened in February 1987 at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, Health Secretary Otis Bowen said that some civil rights might have to be sacrificed because the disease “could well become one of the worse health problems in the history of the world.”
The conference itself was disrupted by a group calling itself the Lavender Hill Mob; it accused the participants of condoning genocide for making such suggestions. The conference focused on the role of the antibody test in the prevention and control of the virus. The Lavender gang said this was the wrong focus; one of its spokesmen yelled out, “This conference should have been about drugs and health care, but it’s not.” Like other members of the homosexual population, they were strongly opposed to making the test mandatory or routine. Obviously, legislation protecting sexual orientation helps them in this cause.
Safeguards
Possibly the Lavender Hill Mob made an impression on the gathering because at the end of the conference public health officials rejected widespread compulsory testing for AIDS in favour of voluntary testing, along with counseling.
They also stressed the need for safeguards to protect privacy and civil rights. “There is a clear and definite need for firm protection of all the information collected in any program of AIDS control,” said Harvard professor William Curran. However he showed less concern for clear and definite protection of those to whom the virus might be transmitted; these apparently do not have a right to knowledge which would protect them from catching a contagious and deadly disease.
Paradox
These events, dating from three years ago, illustrate a paradox: that while the sometimes fatal results of homosexual activity among males are becoming more and more widespread, the campaign to have such activity regarded as normal and natural has not slowed down but rather has increased. In subsequent issues of The Interim we will examine some of the many types of homosexual pressure now evident in our society, and ask why the federal government appears to smile benignly on some of them.
