By Hilary White
TORONTO, February 19, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Liberal government in Ottawa would make the homosexual political agenda a priority in foreign policy says Bob Rae, the former NDP Premier of Ontario and now Liberal candidate for the riding of Toronto Centre.
“We need to look at where we find people who are facing the most awful forms of discrimination, prejudice and repression in a great many countries and a great many societies around the world,” he said.
Rae, a key figure in the Liberal party’s policy development for the next federal election, described the party’s plans for expanding the homosexual agenda at the federal level. Speaking to the Toronto-area homosexual magazine X-Tra, Rae said he would support a private members’ bill by NDP MP Bill Siksay to add “transsexuals” to the list of groups covered by Canada’s hate crimes legislation.
The Church and Wellesley section of the riding for which Rae is a candidate, sometimes referred to by locals as “boys’ town”, is the location of Canada’s largest and most politically active homosexual community. Toronto Centre has been a safe Liberal party riding since Bill Graham was elected to the seat in 1993. Graham retired last year and the by-election is slated for March 17.
Rae said he “leans” towards raising the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16, but is in favour of lowering the age for consent for sodomy from 18 to 16 and is opposed to the “ban” on sexually active homosexuals donating organs. He also said he and the party support restoring funding to the federal Court Challenges programme that was used extensively by homosexual activists to achieve their goals, such as the re-writing of the federal definition of marriage.
In 1994, as the first NDP Premier of Ontario, Bob Rae angered the homosexual activist community by allowing his MPPs to vote according to their conscience on a bill that would have granted same-sex partners the same legal rights as people in natural marriages.
Rae defended his decision, saying that the public support for the homosexual political goals was not there fifteen years ago. But with the Toronto riding by-election coming up, Rae told the homosexual newspaper X-Tra that he would do things differently today.
“One has to look back 15 years and recognize that public opinion in the province and in all three parties was very, very different than it was to become.”
“We had people who were very opposed to it in the NDP caucus at the time. Obviously in the Liberal party, there were a lot of people who were not prepared to vote for it. There was nobody in the Conservative party who was prepared to vote for it.”