I was reading Joe. My. God. this morning and he had a post on a Canadian pastor (Stephen Boissoin) who’s gotten fined for saying things against gays. He and his group (the fairly powerful and well-known Christian Coalition) were also barred from publishing negative comments about gays in the future.

Apparently he wrote a letter to the editor of a paper that got published and then a gay person got attacked in the same town shortly after it was published. His letter was linked to the gay bashing and violá, he was found guilt and ordered to pay something like $7,000 in damages – $5K to one person and $2K to someone else.

Here’s a quote from what he said:

Don’t allow yourself to be deceived any longer. These activists are not morally upright citizens, concerned about the best interests of our society. They are perverse, self-centered and morally deprived individuals who are spreading their psychological disease into every area of our lives. Homosexual rights activists and those that defend them, are just as immoral as the pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps that plague our communities.

The last bit is what everyone is complaining about – equating gays with pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps…

For starters, he chose three interesting groups to compare us to. An argument can be made that drugs and prostitution should be made legal. And saying that all forms of sex between adults and “children” under the age of 18 are criminal is a bit of an outdated notion as well. Children need to be protected, but laws need to be re-evaluated given the changing nature of children’s sexuality.

All three of those groups are “complicated”. He didn’t compare us to rapists or murderers or even embezzlers. He compared us to groups who have complicated sets of issues – much as we have complicated sets of issues (which, thankfully, are becoming less complicated).

And I’m sure I’d fit his definition of “morally depraved”, but that’s not how I think of myself at all. I’m just trying to have a fun sex life. He’s trying so hard to see things in black and white…

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Joe. My. God. thinks it’s a bad precedent, I’m not so sure. Thing is, reading the letter, I disagree with him, I think he’s alarmist, but he’s not calling for physical action against gay people – per se. I don’t know that I would have found him guilty.

But at the same time I have enormous respect for the Canadian legal system. They’re a truly multi-cultural society (at least in the major cities), and these are the laws they have passed to protect the equilibrium in that society and protect minority groups. If he had said something similar about some ethnic group and a member of that ethnic group had been attacked, then there probably would have been the same ruling.

We have to remember gay people are being killed. At the same time people should be able to discuss all sides of the issue. It’s a really difficult balance.

In this case I’d give lukewarm support for the verdict in that the legal system is the correct place for this to be decided. If it’s overturned on appeal – so be it…

I think it’s also important that we as Americans don’t impose our values and norms on other countries. Canada isn’t the United States – they have a different way of dealing with these types of things. It may be interesting for us to discuss, but we need to respect their process since it’s done in good faith and attempts to balance the needs of all groups in a multi-cultural environment.

And we should not forget that this one letter, even if it wasn’t dripping with blood, did apparently result in one of us getting attacked. That is the real lesson here – little things do make a difference and bigotry does lead to physical violence.