Rise of the rainbow hawks: How Conservatives and Canada's gay-rights activists made common cause
Jonathan Kay | August 23, 2013 | Last Updated: Jan 25 7:46 PM ET
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Plenty of Westerners have expressed disgust at Russia’s new law criminalizing the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations.” But few statesmen have put the issue in terms quite as blunt as has Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird. “This mean-spirited and hateful law will affect all Russians,” he told an interviewer earlier this summer. “It is an incitement to intolerance, which breeds hate. And intolerance and hate breed violence.” Mr. Baird also revealed that Canadian officials have personally pressed the issue with their Russian counterparts on no fewer than eight occasions.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper hasn’t just come around to gay rights: He has made the issue a centrepiece of Canada’s foreign policy. His government has fiercely rebuked draconian anti-gay laws in Africa, to the point of infuriating the social-conservative group REAL Women of Canada, which this month publicly denounced Mr. Baird for using his position “to further his own perspective on homosexuality.” The Conservative government has offered protection to persecuted gays in Iran and worked diplomatic channels to convince Russia to scotch plans to ban foreign adoptions by gay couples.
And in an odd twist, the Tories’ hard-line stance against homophobic governments overseas has boomeranged back to powerfully influence the mainstream conservative view of homosexuality here in Canada — a rare example of a foreign-policy posture setting the agenda on an otherwise purely domestic social issue. In the last two decades, support for gay rights in Canada has advanced, particularly compared to historic fights for minority rights, with breathtaking speed, and much of it happening under a Conservative government.
As a result, the Conservatives of 2013 would surely be unrecognizable to the conservative politicians of the 1990s. The Reform party, where Mr. Harper began his political life, voted against the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the Human Rights Act. Reform founder Preston Manning described homosexuality as “destructive to the individual, and in the long run, society.” Stockwell Day dismissed it as a “lifestyle choice.” In 1999, a Calgary Reform MP told the House of Commons that “[traditional] marriage provides a healthy biological design for procreation. Other types of relationships are technically incomplete.” Even as recently as 2004, less than a decade ago, the preservation of marriage as the union of one man and one woman was a central plank of Stephen Harper’s election platform, and a rallying point for his base.
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But Jaime Watt, a political strategist who helped Mike Harris’ Ontario Progressive Conservatives win two provincial elections, believes there is more to the shift than mere political utilitarianism. The seeds of the Harper government’s current gay-supportive policy, he argues, were planted in 1994, after the failure of Ontario’s Bill 167, which would have granted some of the rights associated with marriage to same-sex couples.
“At the time, there were a bunch of us here in Toronto — strategists, lawyers and other professionals — who wanted equality, and we were tired of leaving the issue to the activist left,” he told me. “We started to convince people that this was an issue of Canadian values, that the lives of gay and lesbian people involve more than just what they do with their genitals — that they go to work, take care of children, that they are sons and daughters who care for aging parents. As strategists, we started doing for our [gay] community what we’d been doing for our clients.”
The second big factor Mr. Watt points to is that, in the 1990s, many older gay men and women started coming out of the closet — which had a strong influence on the attitudes of their straight peers: “If you go through life without knowing anyone who is gay, it’s easy to be homophobic. When it’s a friend or family member, not as much.”
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