Cheers, Boos and Yeah!

[talktooloose]

Yesterday was the best LGBTetc. Pride day I've been to in years. The last couple of years (was it just my mindset?) seemed like endless ads for corporations. But this year, there were few purely corporate floats and a long and heartening line of community groups, plus a wide distribution among marchers of small signs encouraging everybody to vote today.

We roundly booed the one Conservative candidate who dared march, claiming that he personally supported equal marriage at the same time as his party leader was telling hardcore supporters out west that he would give them a voice to stop the redefinition of marriage.

A rather scraggly group of anti-corporate pride marchers walked with their signs, one of which was the wittiest of the day: "If I can't have a revolution, I don't want to be part of your dance." (points if know the original)

I made my best line when the parade had yet to start twenty minutes after the set time: "If the fascists were in charge, Pride parades would run on time!"

Comments

[shawnsyms.livejournal.com]

Emma Goldman!

[goodall.livejournal.com]

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."
Emma Goldman

Where was this gay pride celebration you went to?

The best Gay Pride is in New York City. They have the most organizations marching, and not to advertise anything except the fact that there are many different people out there who are fighting every day against injustice and ignorance.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Toronto, where I live. It's become a huge event but, in the last ten years, less and less political. All the official Toronto literature mentions it, but it's become bland and meaningless: "June 27! Come out and show your pride" without any mention of queer people. Grrrrrr.

But, as I send, it transcended somewhat this year.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Yeah! and isn't that a great witty turn on it? Remember when we used to have the GCDC dances instead of the big commercial, meaningless dances? I remember doing coatcheck at the GCDC back in 1989 beside Jack Layton.

[shawnsyms.livejournal.com]

The first GCDC dance I went to was in the late eighties — it was a Hallowe'en dance, and the NDP queer caucus, along with Jack and Olivia, were there dressed as crew members from Star Trek!

[snowmit.livejournal.com]

Let me get this straight. You boo'ed a Conservatice Candidate for daring to break with party lines and coming out to the march to support Gay Pride? And you think that this is a good thing?

Have you gone insane?

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it's interesting that I can't even briefly entertain the idea that a Tory trolling for gay votes is anything but duplicitous. Let's, for a moment, assume that he's a rebel, a pink mole within the new Conservative party of Canada (who don't even titullarly pretend to be "progressive" anymore). Why is he staying with the party? He could, if elected, only be an ignored back-bencher as his party leader played to mobs. No, better to do him a favour and put him out of his misery now.

It's like the Log-Cabin Republicans in America trying to carve a place for themselves as queer conservatives within the GOP. It's like bringing marshmallows when you're the main course at today's auto-da-fé.

[snowmit.livejournal.com]

Well, you have a lot to learn about the Conservative party. It's a deeply divided party. Remember that it's made up of Progressive Conservatives and Alliance people and that this merger only happened very recently. It has barely had time to even figure out what its platform is.

Now, imagine you're a fiscally Conservative, socially progressive person in Canada, your party keeps losing all the elections because the Conservative vote is split. Your party merges with the other party in an effort to stem that tide. The other have of the merger has social policies (or rumours of social policies) that you disagree with. What do you do?

Go to the Liberals? They're corrupt and riddled with Scandal. You want them out. The NDP? They're not fiscally conservative. Form a new party? Welcome to the political fringe. Go with the Conservative party and work to keep the progressive aspect in the party platform? At least you have a hope of building a credible alternative to the Liberals that won't completely fuck things up.

This is not a hypothetical situation, this is a situation that a PC colleague of mine had to figure out and deal with and still struggles with. It's a situation that countless other PCs have had to struggle with too. It's the fundamental problem of party politics, not everyone in the party believes in every part of the 'party line'.

To put it another way: when Liberal politicians come out Against Gay Marriage, do you say to yourself "It's cool, they're in the party that is OK with Gay Marriage"? or do you get mad? Now, if you're in the party that is Ambiguously Against Gay Marriage, why do you not get the benefit of the doubt when you come out in favour of Gays?

[snowmit.livejournal.com]

PS: Are you coming to the election party? It will be a rollicking good time.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

First of all, the Liberals with their pusilanimous leader are no leaders in the fight for gay rights. At the Pride parade, the spent bucks on a rotating sign showing Trudeau on one face, Martin on another and Trudeau's ground-breaking "The nation has no place in the bedrooms of the nation" line on another. As if! As if Martin were Trudeau! As if his "stand" on gay marriage were more than just, "Um, I'll abide with the decision of the court whether I agree with it or not. Which I won't tell you."

Okay.

My problem is that I have yet to meet the fiscal conservative who is anywhere near my views on social concerns. I have yet to meet the fiscal conservative who understands the dynamics of poverty and who can empathize with it. I have yet to meet one who's policy ideas are not based on greed. Since the ascendency of the neocons, income gaps have not just widened, they have gaped. Public education and other institutions that can work against the extreme gravitational pull of ruinous, hopeless poverty have been eroded severely and the middle class have reacted by circling the wagons, pulling out of public schools, and voting conservative because the tax cuts will at least get them a few bucks to ease their debt load.

Harris and Bush and the newest neocons don't even make sense fiscally! They run huge deficits with their programs and the only ones to benefit are the wealthy.

I know there is a difference between Joe Clark PCs and Harper's Reformers in Bay Street drag. But neither side has a vision that does not look like pig-headed self-interest to me.

Maybe socially liberal, fiscally conservative people exist. I hardly know enough about economics to say that their policies, fairly enacted, would not be the best economic solution we have seen. Maybe I just hang out in the park with the wrong type of people, but, I'm sorry, the Conservatives are my nightmare. The Liberals are my extreme annoyance and must be held in check, but the Tories are the end of my Canada.

I'm voting NDP because I want their voice louder in Ottawa.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Peut être. J'espère que oui.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Peut être. J'espère que oui.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

btw, I find this kind of discussion very emotionally draining but I'm grateful for your pushing.

Seriously, though, if I were a debater, I think I'd be weeping all the time.