by Hilary White
TORONTO, September 6, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Ontario’s leading homosexual lobby group has cancelled a planned leaders’ “debate” due to lack of interest by leaders. The three main political parties in Ontario declined to attend the event that EGALE hoped would mimic one staged by their counterparts in the US.
A pair of homosexual activist organisations in the US staged a political stunt last month in which most of the Democrat hopefuls for the presidential nomination were grilled by a panel to see which one was the most “gay friendly”.
Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, John Edwards and Chris Dodd agreed to appear in Los Angeles August 9 to take questions from representatives of the gay lobby. The event was sponsored by Viacom’s homosexual television network LOGO and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the most influential lobby group of homosexual activists in the United States.
Instead of the traditional debate format in which leaders address questions on the same stage, in the HRC event each was brought out, in a format similar to that of some game shows of the 1970’s, to take questions individually from the panel who judged each according to his or her responses.
Not to be outdone by their US counterparts, a day after the announcement of the US “debate”, EGALE said it would be inviting the leaders of the Ontario political parties to do the same at an event it was calling “Queering The Vote”.
Originally scheduled for Sept. 9, the event was cancelled on Sept. 5 because three of the four invited provincial party leaders decided not to attend.
LifeSiteNews.com received the media release and called the offices of the provincial Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, and Communist parties. None of the parties we contacted had heard of the event but the NDP and Communist party spokesmen both hastened to assure LifeSiteNews.com that they fully supported all of EGALE’s political ambitions, whatever they were.
The head of the Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) and a former school trustee, Elizabeth Rowley, was particularly adamant that she wanted to see the end of public funding for Catholic schools which she thought was inherently discriminatory to homosexuals and other minorities.
EGALE executive director Helen Kennedy told the local homosexual Toronto paper X-tra, “We’re very disappointed. I don’t know why [they refused]. We weren’t given any concrete reasons.”