Revolutionary Moderation

Corrections



I'm not willing to draw any certain conclusions based on this, but David Kilgour's website certainly offers a more rational explanation for his comments last week:

I do not in any way believe that homosexuality leads to incest and/or polygamy and in no way meant to imply that they are related.



My comments stem from a concern that were a law to be too broadly written, it might be legally impossible to prevent any individuals from marrying. I deeply regret that my comments may have been misinterpreted as disparaging towards gay and lesbian Canadians.

I don't find this argument entirely convincing - it comes from a similar place to the fear that adding homosexuality to the protection from hate speech would ban the Bible (a fear evidently not shared by Mr. Kilgour, which to my mind adds weight to his credibility). But taking Mr. Kilgour at his word here, his argument is at least within the realm of serious public debate, as opposed to Larry Spencer's lunatic ravings. The two do not deserve to be compared.



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The other correction isn't really a correction per se, but an add-on. Remember my evaluation of Scott Brison on Friday? I heard him again this weekend, and one thing finally sunk in - he has launched his leadership campaign around Spencer's comments.



Over and over again, he talked about the "family values" critic, corrected each time by someone noting that Larry Spencer was the "family affairs" critic. I know this seems to be shaving the point rather thin, but this was intentional use of language that most Canadians associate, negatively, with social conservatism, and he's using that language as a stick to beat up Harper. He's staking out an interesting piece of ground: "The Reform and Alliance parties have carried around the baggage of social conservatism for fifteen years. Elect me leader, and never again hear the word "homophobic," he seems to be saying.



I'm not sure how successful this campaign might be - after all, there's a certain element of the Alliance party (Larry Spencer's "we", as in "we can live with [Brison]") that doesn't think social conservatism is a bad thing at all - it's a reason they found the Reform Party attractive in the first place. The Conservative merger, even if it passes, may be doomed to fail in the longer term, split on these lines. (Someone quoted John Crosbie to me in Babble, and it deserves to be repeated: "It's the 90% of Reformers that give the other 10% a bad name." Hee!)