The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Has there ever been another example of political correctness gone mad? Ever an example of pack journalism stumbling over its own feet? We refer, of course, to the pitiful performance of the four Toronto newspapers, for nearly a month, with their obsession on the arcane issue of same-sex marriage, apparently the most important subject in the world since Churchill saved Western Civilization. Never have so many forests been decimated for such a subject that interests so few people. Fully 33 1/3 of the newspages of the Mop and Pail, Toronto Star, Toronto Fun and the National Pest have been devoted to the subject. Feverish MPs interviewed, every single columnist fulminating that the fate of society rests on the question, every second editorial ponderously coming to no conclusion, all the speculation that J. Chretien is going to dump the problem on P. Martin. The puzzlement about the obsession with same-sex marriage with the high-elite newspapers rests, one suspects, with the vast majority of Canadians. By all the reasonable statistics in this country applied to the question, those experts in the know tell us that some five per cent Ñ of the population of our 31 million Ñ are gays or lesbians. One could give a good guess that there are more vegetarians in Canada than the group that is now fascinating the nation's leaders in journalism. It is an issue, one grants, of concern to that five per cent (but not all of them.) But is it really worthy of page after page of front-page headlines, shoving the ridiculous war in Iraq to page 15? I have homosexual friends, quiet partners with their others for years, professional men, who are dumbfounded at the current headlines. They, for example, are contemptuous of Toronto's ridiculous Gay and Lesbian Parade each summer down Church Street where the exhibitionists stroll in jock-straps and the girls bare their breasts and where thousands of suburbanites line the sidewalks to goggle in their voyeurism and the shallow politicians such as Mel LastmanÑto demonstrate "his diversity"Ñ ride in a float and squirt water at the pitiful pedestrians. See 'Today' P.# Con't from P.# Today's same-sex headlines are in the same league. Child poverty is apparently not as interesting. What is really interesting, in the Ontario context as the previously-dull Dalton McGuinty is about to become premier on Oct. 2, is how the same-sex obsession has hurt the prospects of the awkward Ernie Eves. He, the previous finance minister who vaulted back from Bay Street to be the un-elected leader of the Conservative party, relies as usual on the rural votes of Ontario that have kept his party in power for most of this century. Good burghers, farmers, family people, conservative in the real sense of the word. The same-sex debate has brought to the fore, naturally, the thinking out there in the boonies, about the traditional marriage. Ernie Eves, divorced, boasts on his arm at every TV image, his "life partner," Isabel Bassett, the wealthy widow of media tycoon John Bassett. Why doesn't he marry her, says the farm? Mike Harris, once the best buddy of Ernie, never left his voters from his North Bay riding, knowing that he wanted to display his roots. Ernie, from nearby Parry Sound (where Bobby Orr is God) with his slicked coiffure and Turnbull and Asser shirts, fled his Parry Sound riding to remove it to the Bassett estate in the Toronto-rich retreat of Caledon Hills, just north of the city that is controlled by Liberal and NDP representatives in Ottawa. Ernie has "gone Toronto" in the eyes of the voters who elected down-home Mike Harris for two terms, the guy whose handlers ordered him never to wear a tux, for how many votes it would cost him. Ontario is thought, by the rest of Canada, as a "stodgy" province. In fact, it is unique. All the other provinces have never done the same. British California jumps between socialists and Social Credit crazies who masquerade as Liberals. Quebec jumps between separatists and federalists. The Atlantic people never vary between Grits and Tories, depending on how their fathers voted. Manitoba and Sask. jump between semi-socialists and the others. Alberta of course goes only one way, the longest-serving one-party state since Albania. Ontario, no one seems to notice, in three different elections went from Tory to Liberal to NDP. And now, thanks to this same-sex nonsense that has upset the Tory root vote on the farm, will elect Premier McGuinty. ContinuedÉ Quote of the Year Ð Adrienne Clarkson, after lobbying furiously for the Governor-General post after her lobbying for the CBC presidency failed, on TV explaining her 60-body, $1 million junket, "I am above politics."
