It was an extraordinary sight. John Baird sitting next to Julian Fantino at a committee meeting this morning, blasting the hideous anti-gay statements of a Canadian religious organization.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird took aim Tuesday at “offensive” and “mean-spirited” statements on the website of an organization that gets federal funding to do aid work in Uganda.
A page from the group’s website that has been removed, but is still available as a cached version, calls homosexuality and transvestism perversions and lists them along with pedophilia and bestiality.
A day after Fantino defended his decision to fund that organization’s activities in one of the most anti-gay countries on earth. And fast tracked its approval.
In an email to CBCNews.ca late Monday, CIDA said it has completed a review of Crossroads Christian Communications’ funding and said it does comply with its contribution agreement, so the money would continue to flow. On Sunday, Fantino had tweeted that the funding would be reviewed.
Approved it just like that. *Snap* Even though Crossroads has been criticized before for broadcasting the worst kind of hateful anti-gay content.
In the context of the various discussions, comments were made about homosexuals, such as that they force their “hidden agenda” on societal institutions, “try to indoctrinate children” in a manner “almost like Nazi brainwashing”, they “rape straight boys”, that acceptance of homosexuals can be “destructive” towards society. One caller even mentioned an alleged case of a “bisexual cross-dresser” who had brutally murdered a man and had sex with the body. The caller suggested that the entire homosexual community is prone to this type of behaviour that specifically targets straight people in a violent manner.
And even though it was American evangelical groups similar to Crossroads that triggered the anti-gay pogrom in Uganda, with the same kind of blood libel.
For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality.
The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”
So what did John Baird say when the NDP’s Hélène Laverdière asked him in Question Period, whether funding an anti-gay group in Uganda was the message Canada wanted to send the world?
Absolutely NOTHING.
Fantino answered the question rather than Baird, repeating the only statements he’s provided since questions first surfaced.
“I can assure the member opposite that CIDA programs are delivered without discrimination or bias and that is the case here . . . . To assert otherwise is absolutely untrue,” he said.
Baird just sat there strangely silent all through Question Period, looking very, very, unhappy. As grim as I have ever seen him . . .
Like a man in shock, or one forced to put his party before his own humanity. And betray his own kind.
As if he had just been read the riot act by Great Faith Leader and his sweaty theocons in the PMO. And told that to attack one religious group would be to attack them ALL.
And that they can’t do that because it would infuriate their rabid religious base, who now that Harper is cutting subsidies to political parties, they need more than EVER.
So will he please STFU and be a good gay stooge, or they’ll muzzle him like all the others.
Which leaves poor Baird in an unfortunate position. After having done the right thing, for the first time in his life.
And leaves the Cons caught in a trap of their own making. Offend religious groups and lose those old grubby voters and their juicy Jesus dollars. Or offend and scare others with their no longer hidden theocratic agenda, and lose all those young and urban voters.
Caught like rats in a bigot trap that if we are lucky might eventually help fracture their party. Like the gay marriage issue just split the Conservatives in Britain.
And in the meantime allows progressives to portray the Cons as something that just crawled out of a sewer, or Pope Benny’s rear end, or a church in Uganda.
Or Lord Harper’s Theatre of Sacred Cruelty and Genocide…
Where a bloodthirsty Jesus compares gay love to bestiality. Women are mugged or jailed for having an abortion. The poor and the old sing for their supper. And the truth is what His Satanic Oil Pig Majesty says it is. Or what the Lord or the polls tell him it is in his moments of madness.
Hmmm . . . . I think we can work with that one eh?
Save us from the religious fanatics who would wallow in the blood of the innocent.
Save the poor LGBT people of Uganda.
Deliver us from the evil and the madness of Stephen Harper.
Destroy those genocide monsters . . .
