You Are Free to be a Bigot

But that doesn't give you a blanket right to spew whatever crap you want on the public stage without someone calling you out on it.

Almost as if the news reporters were feeling psychic today, we find the next volley in the gay rights debate being lobbed about.

I'll not dwell on the actual content of the websites that Chandler owns - if you want to find them, google "Concerned Christians Canada" or "Freedom Radio Network Canada" - you'll find it fast enough. (His radio "program" is a variation on American-style right-wing talk radio - bombastic, inflammatory and utterly ridiculous - listen to it at your own risk)

There's a few comments in the news article that I wish to explore a little bit though:

On another episode Chandler himself suggests homosexuality is a result of a genetic weakness that could be altered with hormones or steroids.

This is an amazingly farcicle statement, and only serves to underscore the utter ignorance of Mr. Chandler and his crew. There is no evidence that homosexuals are hormonally imbalanced. Worse, there are periods in our history where homosexuality has been "treated" by injections of estrogen. For a brief look at the consequences of that particularly misguided view, I refer readers to Alan Turing's case. After WW II, Turing was convicted of being homosexual, and was given a choice of either hormone treatments or prison. He chose the hormone treatments, which in theory were supposed to reduce his libido, but really only caused him to start growing breasts. There is good reason to believe that this was a major contributing factor to his suicide. When Alan Turing died, the world lost one of its greatest mathematical minds - the mind whose talents were instrumental in breaking the Enigma Machine code.

While there is some evidence that sexual behaviours are somewhat influenced by hormone exposure during gestation, but these are hypothesis at this time, and far from well founded theories. It seems simplistic - and wrong - to suspect that altering someone's hormonal balance in adulthood is going to affect their sexual identity.

Chandler says his sites are protected by freedom of speech and the freedom to express religious beliefs. He says he feels persecuted and that he's the real victim of a hate crime.

This is a relatively recent tactic on the part of the religious right wing - they wrap themselves in the cloak of victimhood, and claim that it is they who are being discriminated against.

The problem is that they are expressing opinions, and they have based their opinions upon points that are politely described as suspect. A quick perusal of "Concerned Christians" website shows that they (Boisson and Chandler) draw their "facts" from sources of such dubious quality as "NARTH", "Traditional Values Coalition", "Grace Magazine", etc. Hardly what most of us would understand to be bastions of good academic practice in conducting the kinds of studies that are necessary to make useful analysis of these kind of topics. (I would imagine that if I cited a "Traditional Values Coalition" as a backing source of evidence for a peer reviewed psychology journal, I'd find my paper roundly trashed unless I had a lot of corroborating evidence from other sources whose biases are less blatant.)

It's rather like a white supremacist asserting that blacks are an inferior race, but in reality there is little - or no - rational evidence to support such a claim. The difference between doing this in private conversation in a coffee shop and in a public broadcast like a radio show is trivially obvious. (e.g. intended scope of impact...) The thinking seems to be that because they are "Christian", they should be free to say anything they want, no matter how ill-informed it may be, and have it protected as "religious expression".

Whether the complaints against Chandler and his websites will get very far remains to be seen. The vagaries of the Canadian Human Rights are somewhat arcane to me.

My guess is that the theo-conservative types will start playing this up, loudly just before the fall sitting of Parliament. Their goal will be to wake up their "base" of support and get them to lobby their MPs so that the SGM marriage debate will be reopened in the parliament.

In the meantime, watching Chandler squirm is its own entertainment. The one time I met the man, he reminded me of the schoolyard thugs that I used to so despise as a child - not something I exactly admire.