Too Much Tolerance

"You don't like it? Fine, stay home and shut up."

That's comment #21, 'Queer Bob' responding to a post at
Blue Like You, regarding the Toronto Gay Pride Parade and it's associated $400,000 tab last weekend. Do I need to mention here that I'm not a hysterical homophobe? If only to keep the discussion on track, yes, I have an 'It's Okay to be Gay' t-shirt.

Well, I'm not going to stay home just because something I don't like is happening downtown, regardless of how many business owners and visitors tell me to, and here's why.

TMT (Too Much Tolerance) is the natural evolution of weak policies or attitudes. 'Gay Pride' is an example of 'red-neck' (I hate to use that term here, having a real cultural fondness for the 'red-neck' get-it-done attitude) homophobia spawning what originated as a backlash and seeking of real justice from the more vocal elements of the gay community. The Gay Pride Parade is the mutation of that quest, and has now exceeded the 'tolerance' of the average Canadian, prompting a backlash of it's own. Funny how human beings are subject to these cycles of less and more.

Diversity education, not singing the national anthem, wearing a burka, not saying 'Merry Christmas'.....these are some of the 'politically correct' touch issues that average, sensible, middle class Canadians are starting to respond to. Enough is enough. We can identify what Joseph Ben-Ami calls a "patchwork of confused and often contradictory policies" coming out of the so-called Conservative Government these days. We can see the erosion of basic Canadian values that we know in our core are essential to preserving this culture.

So too much tolerance is bad. David Warren identifies the same issue, "In two generations, we have witnessed a transformation, and nearly an inversion, of all the moral and ethical principles that guided us through countless generations before."

Mahfooz Kanwar, PHD, Sociologist, Instructor at Mount Royal College and board member of the Muslim Canadian Congress was on the Rutherford Show on QR77 Radio this morning. He reiterated his stand and hit the nail on the head again, as he did this past March 30, with an article in the Calgary Herald. "Increasingly, Canadians feel restricted in doing things the Canadian way lest we offend minorities. We cannot even say Merry Christmas without fear of causing offence. It is amazing that 77 per cent of the Canadian majority are scared of offending 23 per cent of minorities."

"We have become so timid that the majority cannot assert its own freedom of expression. We cannot publicly question certain foreign social customs, traditions and values that do not fit into the Canadian ethos of equality. Rather than encouraging new immigrants to adjust to Canada, we tolerate peculiar ways of doing things. We do not remind them that they are in Canada, not in their original homelands......"

".....I once supported multiculturalism in Canada because I believed it gave us a sense of pluralism and diversity. However, I have observed and experienced that official multiculturalism has encouraged convolution of the values that make Canada the kind of place people want to immigrate to in the first place."

I tolerated 'Diversity Education' for a long time, didn't speak up when they banned saying 'Merry Christmas' at work, and didn't write a letter when they stopped 'O Canada' from being sung at school. I won't be silent anymore, and I don't think mine will be the only voice raised.

I want downtown back. I want it back for all of us.