Gay men have done everything in their power to be seen as sex-obsessed party animals.
Now that I've just committed a crime, I'd appreciate it if you refrain from calling the cops. Okay, I took a little licence there: I will have committed a crime if New Democratic Party Member of Parliament Svend Robinson and his lobbyists have their way.
In response to the recent murder of a gay Vancouver man, Robinson introduced a Private Member's Bill that would include sexual orientation among the grounds protected by Canadian hate crimes legislation.
And gay lobbyists are on side: Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (EGALE) expressed its support for Robinson's initiative. Ramping up the rhetoric, EGALE's Executive Director John Fisher stated that "violence, hatred and murder are unacceptable, full stop", and that violence against gays is "implicitly condoned by the federal government as long as [gays] are excluded from hate crimes legislation".
So you're either for the legislation or you're for violence. (Where have we heard rhetoric like that before?) Since no one other than rap stars and pro wrestlers is for violence, we all better get on side.
Unless we say that the gay emperor is naked, which I will do since I come not to praise Fisher but to parse him. By commingling hatred with violence, Fisher words conceal, rather than reveal, the nature of hate crimes legislation. As the Canadian Criminal Code already protects gays from violence and murder, Fisher's real aim is to forestall expressions of hatred. He seeks protection from dangerous speech, not dangerous people; from harmful words, not harmful deeds. That this is so is confirmed by the fact that EGALE supports the inclusion of sexual orientation in the hate propaganda sections of the Criminal Code (ss.318-320), sections that deal exclusively with expression.
And although gays view hate crimes legislation like kids see Santa Claus, the threat to freedom of expression should be reason enough for gays to oppose the law as the most dangerous piece of claptrap since Oscar Wilde was carted off to the Reading Gaol.
Gays were traditionally preoccupied with protecting, rather than proscribing, free expression. Perhaps most famously, Little Sisters, a Vancouver gay and lesbian bookstore, challenged the right of Canada Customs' officials to seize books under Canada's obscenity law. After a 15-year battle, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the law but condemned Canada Customs for its discriminatory conduct in seizing a disproportionate number of gay and lesbian titles: "up to 75 per cent of the materialÉdetained and examined for obscenity was directed at homosexual audiences."
The Little Sisters case betrays a critical fact that should encourage gays to rethink and reevaluate their support for hate crimes legislation: Laws proscribing expression are often used against the least popular and least powerful people and positions. Canada's hate propaganda provisions have been applied against Jewish literature, French-Canadian nationalists and a film about Nelson Mandela. It should come as no surprise, then, if the law muzzles gay activism and stifles debate within the gay community itself.
For example: I'm not the author of my opening statement equating gay men with sex-obsessed animals. Nor is it the product of an evangelical preacher. It's a paraphrase of National Journal columnist Jonathan Rauch's review of Out for Good, a history of the gay movement by Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney. If Robinson and EGALE are successful in their efforts to limit speech, eloquent writers like Rauch may be the first to fall.
In the final analysis, gays may have the last word on hate speech, but it may prove to be the last words gays have.