Who did you think these people were?
Conservatives are most often homophobes—even today, only most of them now have the sense to make their most colourful bigoted comments far away from open microphones.
As a student and a partisan political activist in Alberta during the Getty and Klein years, I had the opportunity to deal with my Tory counterparts pretty much on a daily basis. Fag jokes were up there with native-bashing and misogyny as surefire knee-slappers with a lot of that crew. With all the focus on Lukiwski’s one-liner on the infamous tape, many of us are forgetting the misogynistic and racist garbage that accompanied it, material that also comes as no surprise to me.
The year after Tom Lukiwski and friends (including at least one from Alberta) taped their zany act for posterity in Saskatchewan, the Calgary Herald reported on skits presented at an Alberta Tory policy convention, which included cabinet minister Jim Horsman playing “Serge,” an effeminate gay stereotype based on a character of the same name in Beverly Hills Cop. This was an Alberta cabinet minister making fun of gay men in front of hundreds of party faithful. The crowd ate it up.
Another reaction to the current scandal I have trouble understanding is the idea that 1991 Canada was something akin to the antebellum U.S. South, and that one could excuse AIDS and fag jokes because we didn’t know any better back then. Well, a lot of us certainly did. We went after Alberta ministers like Elaine McCoy to include gays and lesbians in provincial human rights legislation, as other provinces had done or were in the process of doing. (Alberta still refuses to amend provincial statutes, the lone provincial holdout more than 30 years after Quebec took this step.) New Democrat MP Svend Robinson had been out of the closet for three years, AIDS activists had been marching even longer than that, and it was only months before the courts read into the Charter the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Like I said, most Conservatives are homophobes. Anyone who votes against gay marriage is a bigot and a homophobe. Yep, a pretty harsh, categorical statement, but there it is. As Bloc Québécois MP Réal Ménard noted during the last Parliamentary gay marriage debate, we could begin to take seriously the idea of “principled” and non-bigoted opposition to gay marriage by the Tories had they not voted against every single advance for equal rights since the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969. (The Tory MP whom Lukiwski replaced, by the way, was Larry Spencer, who advocated re-criminalizing homosexuality. Harper punted Spencer from caucus. For such small mercies are we grateful.)
Any remaining temptation to absolve today’s Tories of homophobia can be erased by reading their MPs’ speeches on gay marriage in recent years, including Lukiwski’s. (Hansard is available on Parliament’s website, by the way.) Lukiwski condemned the opposition parties’ support of gay marriage more harshly than many of his colleagues did, and forecast a variety of adverse social consequences of tolerance, including polygamy.
Lukiwski’s vehement, self-righteous diatribes in the House on gay marriage certainly didn’t match the contrite, self-effacing persona he adopted last week when the shit hit the fan, dirtying him a lot worse than the gay fingernails he mentioned on the tape. He has apologized repeatedly and profusely, doing all the right things, to the extent possible by someone who has gone out of his way to champion discrimination.
The problem is that people like Tom Lukiwski and a lot of his Tory friends don’t really get it, and by “it” I mean the whole idea of human rights. Lukiwski apologized on a personal level to gay and lesbian colleagues and other gay people he knew, but he didn’t display any genuine understanding of the larger issue of systemic discrimination. It’s kind of like a “gentlemanly” segregationist who would avoid gratuitous slurs against people of colour and apologize if he slipped, but went on supporting segregation. He might even have a pet visible minority friend or two, but he wouldn’t allow that to change his views on public policy.
I believe Lukiwski when he says he is embarrassed and that he thinks he is now a tolerant and understanding person. I see no reason for him to step down, since it would be singling him out unfairly among his colleagues, most of whom have a similar mindset to the 2008 Lukiwski, if not the 1991 version.
And this is the most important point: if Canadians are really that appalled by homophobia and bigotry, they should vote out the entire Conservative party, not just one MP who got caught carrying this sentiment to its logical if not exactly telegenic conclusion. Of course, this is unlikely to happen. Lukiwski, if he runs again, will be re-elected. I’m prepared to bet on that. He might even win an increased majority. And this incident will be but a blip on the federal political scene.
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