ONDP MPP Cheri DiNovo calls on John Baird to come out of the closet

Clearly when John Baird went into politics he decided that his role model would be J. Edgar Hoover as opposed to Harvey Milk. It must suck to be him!

For the record...does anybody actually even KNOW for certain that Baird is gay?  And what is DiNovo's point here?  It's up to Baird to come out or not, and it's not as if a heterosexual person couldn't have said what Baird said about the Russian gay pogrom law.

This just seems really murky and inappropriate, and it's hard to understand why Baird's personal sexuality should be Dinovo's concern at this particular moment. 

Ken Burch wrote:

For the record...does anybody actually even KNOW for certain that Baird is gay?  And what is DiNovo's point here?  It's up to Baird to come out or not, and it's not as if a heterosexual person couldn't have said what Baird said about the Russian gay pogrom law.

Correct.

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This just seems really murky and inappropriate, and it's hard to understand why Baird's personal sexuality should be Dinovo's concern at this particular moment. 

It's DiNovo's modus operandi. When she spoke in favour of the attack on Israeli Apartheid Week and made the horrific vote "unanimous" (Andrea Horwath had to retract afterward), friends and allies of hers felt naturally betrayed.

She blew a gasket, deleting friends from her Facebook page, claiming (though not to the cops!) that she and her family were the victim of "death threats", etc. One out gay friend criticized her severely for her anti-democratic stand - to which she replied "as a queer woman". This was March 2010. Came as a bit of a shock to her friends and colleagues, and maybe her husband - but really, how is that any of our business??

Then, 17 months later, we are treated to this gem:

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“I wouldn’t consider myself queer now. I mean, I’m monogamous, married for 13 years. On what basis would I claim that now?”

Indeed.

Ms DiNovo seems to think her sexual orientation (perhaps that should be plural) are of great interest to the public, especially at a time when she should have been apologizing for and retracting her cowardly support for Peter Shurman's attack on IAW.

It's no wonder, then, that the bedrooms of others would, in her twisted world view, be fair game for the public spotlight as well.

Don't know the background of this... but if Baird's sexuality isn't common knowledge and she's "outing" him, that's pretty low. Even with the best of intentions. There might be narrow circumstances where you might out someone for being a secretly gay homophobe, as an act of self defense as if to say "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". But that's certainly not this. I would want our government to stand up for gay rights internationally, regardless of what their sexuality is, and bringing personal secrets into this is extremely bad form.

I don't know or care whether Baird is gay. His sex life is his business and it's completely inappropriate for DiNovo to make these kinds of comments. I'm not usually a fan of Baird but he was at least good in strongly condemning the anti-gay laws in Russia. Though, as others pointed out, every decent person should denounce such laws, their own sexual orientation being irrelevant

Stockholm wrote:

For some reason there is no such discretion when it comes to heterosexual politicians. They don't seem to have to call a news conference declaring themselves to be straight in order for the media to feel free to report on who their opposite sex partners/spouses are.

Well, being married or openly in a relationship would seem to be a "public declaration".

As for Baird, I mean, who cares? He's not like some hypocritical Republicans down south who vote against gay rights legislation while cruising airport men's rooms with a "wide stance" in search of blowjobs from other dudes. It's not like he's married and having affairs. Really, I don't see why John Baird's sex life should be of interest to anyone other than John Baird.

Mr.Tea wrote:

As for Baird, I mean, who cares? He's not like some hypocritical Republicans down south who vote against gay rights legislation while cruising airport men's rooms with a "wide stance" in search of blowjobs from other dudes. It's not like he's married and having affairs. Really, I don't see why John Baird's sex life should be of interest to anyone other than John Baird.

Being gay is not just "a sex life" its an identity. I am interested in what would make a gay man ravitate to a party that was blatantly homophobic in the first place...but perhaps that's an issue between him and his psychiatrist.

Keep in mind that Baird was first elected provincially in the 1995 Ontario election as part of Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution. In that election campaign, the jewel in the crown of the PC campaign was their total opposition to giving any relationship recognition of any kind to same sex couples. In fact they ran vicious radio ads thoughout that campaign lambasting the NDP for wanting to give gay couples the right to visit each other if one was dying in the hospital.

I would be very curious to know what ran through his head as a young gay man running as a PC candidate when his party was blatantly pandering to homophobic sentiments and handing out literature that verged on hate propaganda against gays.

I think the reason why John Baird will never publicly announce he's gay - is because he doesn't want to ever have to answer questions like that.

Actually 'common knowledge' that someone is gay is not the measure of whether they are 'more or less out'.

Scott Brison has been very open about being gay since he was a teenager. I think no small number of people knew when he was still in high school, and we're talking rural Nova Scotia in the 1980s. Certainly eveveryone locally knew when he went to university in Halifax, still was much around here, and very active in the local as well as provincial PC Youth. So the entire Ottawa press corps knew, and like Baird he never made the slightest attempt for people not to know.

But for his own reasons he did not want to be public about it, and he was not until he decided to run for the PC leadership, and it was bound to come out if he did not bring it up first. Only then did he do it.

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“Now we need [Baird] to stand up,” DiNovo says. “We have an openly gay foreign minister. We want him to go to Russia, stand on Russian soil and say, ‘I’m gay. Deal with it.’”

I'm not very astute with politics. What exactly would this hope to acomplish? Is Russia supposed to say oh shit Canada has a gay foreign minister, let's change our stupid and ignorant policy?

What if the shoe were on the other foot and the Russians sent an anti-gay minister over to Canada to publically say they think homosexuality is wrong, deal with it. It doesn't seem like an intelligent suggestion for us to do, does it?

Actually the Conservatives in Canada added the prefix Progressive much earlier then that. it happened in the early 1940s when John Bracken became leader of the party and he was Premier of manitoba and had roots in the old Progressive party. When he became Tory leader he insisted the the party name become Progressive Conservative

Stockholm wrote:

Actually the Conservatives in Canada added the prefix Progressive much earlier then that. it happened in the early 1940s when John Bracken became leader of the party and he was Premier of manitoba and had roots in the old Progressive party. When he became Tory leader he insisted the the party name become Progressive Conservative

I stand corrected.  Always associated it with "Dief the Chief", probably because, as party leader and prime minister, he embodied the concept of "progressive conservatism" more than anybody else ever seemed to(especially more than the last elected "Progressive Conservative" prime minister, Brian The Chin.

Its funny that people talk about "outing" Baird. He is "out". Its not like he is some married man who has sex with men in public washrooms. Apparently he frequents gay bars and blatantly tries to pick up men and hands out his business card. He doesn't try to keep it a secret. The media are the ones who treat  being gay as if it was equivalent to having bubonic plague

So is the correct answer that John Baird is allowed to be gay? Holy Mackerel!

Stockholm wrote:

Its funny that people talk about "outing" Baird. He is "out". Its not like he is some married man who has sex with men in public washrooms. Apparently he frequents gay bars and blatantly tries to pick up men and hands out his business card. He doesn't try to keep it a secret. The media are the ones who treat  being gay as if it was equivalent to having bubonic plague

 How do people know this? Have you personally seen him do it or is it just a rumour?

Stockholm wrote:

Its funny that people talk about "outing" Baird. He is "out". Its not like he is some married man who has sex with men in public washrooms. Apparently he frequents gay bars and blatantly tries to pick up men and hands out his business card. He doesn't try to keep it a secret. The media are the ones who treat  being gay as if it was equivalent to having bubonic plague

uh...."apparently"?  That's good enough attribution for you?

The issue here, Stocks, is not that the media(to my knowledge)or anyone here feels that something is wrong with being gay.  It's about whether "outing" someone is ever appropriate.  It's about the natural human right to privacy, and the right of everyone to decide on their own terms(assuming they aren't being a gaybashing hypocrite in the performance of their public duties)how public they will and will not be about their sexuality. 

The fact that Baird is a Conservative cabinet minister is not justification for outing him(if there is anything to be outed about).

And this particular demand was made of him after he took a strongly pro-LGBTQ position regarding the Sochi Games and the Russian gay pogrom law-it's not like he was supporting Putin on the issue...so there's even less justification to make the demand of him.

And Ms Dinovo(a person who has taken a weirdly ambiguous stance towards her own sexual identity)has little moral or personal authority to be making the demand herself. 

I know for a FACT that John Baird is gay. That is all I will say on the matter. So we can end the speculation now.

Like flies to shit, Canucklheads are far more likely to be drawn to dreck and dross like this pedalled by no difference partier DiNovo then they are to critically important foreign policy decisions being made on their behalf re: Libya, Syria, Palestine etc. As to who John Baird's fucking, it's us...and them.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/palestinians-will-face-cons...

It's refreshing to have such a clear exposé of the face of the NDP which I reject - that of the ideas put forward by DiNovo and Stockholm. A useful reminder of the work that needs to be done.

Glass closet

http://dailyxtra.com/toronto/news/glass-closet?market=210

Matthew Hays of Xtra wrote:

We know there may be a few, though Xtra’s policy on outing has always been clear: we don’t do it. But the media’s handling of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, in particular, highlights the struggle mainstream journalists have in handling the public profiles of politicians and their supposedly private lives.

Just to set the record straight, it was not some nasty commie queer activist who outed Baird. It was another Tory. On Feb 2, 2010, Conservative candidate Pamela Taylor, who was then running for Ontario provincial office in a by-election, was asked, while on a morning radio chat show, if she could name a single gay Tory. “Openly gay? John Baird,” she responded. 

Baird had long been identified as gay in the blogosphere, where, it seems, such things dare speak their name. Up until that point, the mainstream media had avoided the issue.

<snip>

But proponents of outing — that is, the act of pushing public figures out of the closet against their will — have long suggested that such acts are entirely justifiable where hypocrisy is involved. Simply put, if you’re working against the rights of queer people, you’ve abdicated your right to remain in the closet. 

This question becomes more complicated with Baird, seeing as he is now criticizing governments in other parts of the world for their homophobic policies. Since fighting homophobic laws abroad seems to be part of his agenda, isn’t it then fair to bring up his sexual orientation? To ask Baird how he works within the Conservative Party, given that we know many of its MPs and supporters are hostile to queer rights?

Open Secret: Conservative Cabinet Minister John Baird outed (Xtra, Feb. 7, 2010)

http://dailyxtra.com/canada/news/open-secret-conservative-cabinet-minist...

One of the articles linked in this post quotes a source who states that the mainstream media doesn't talk about Baird's sexuality because that's what he wants. As long as he isn't a hypocritical Republican about it, fucking rent boys at night and passing anti-gay legislation during the day, surely it's his own personal private business. Much as I deplore the policies of the Conservative party, the fact that our media don't make hay about Baird's sexuality sets a gay-positive example the rest of the world might follow.

Cheri's stance is weird. She says, “Now we need [Baird] to stand up,” DiNovo says. “We have an openly gay foreign minister..." 

Okay - so if he's already openly gay, why does he need to come out?

It's weird to demand that a political figure making LGBTQ-supportive statements come out as gay.  In one sense, it can actually harm the LGBTQ cause-because the demand essentially endorses the social conservative view that only gays would oppose the persecution of gays. 

It's not like Baird came out in support of Putin's hate law.  If he had, then a demand that he came out might be justified(if it were known with certainty that Baird actually WAS gay-if not, it would just be rumor-spreading).

But as long as their are consequences, sometimes, lethal consequences. to revealing one's sexual identity, there are strict limits as to who can make the demand for such a self-revelation and why the demand can be made.

And it's also strange that some seem to be arguing that DiNovo's demand here is justified simply because it's a way to attack a Conservative cabinet minister.  That kind of tactic has taken the Left to bad places in the past.

Ken Burch wrote:

And there's a major difference between the consequences a person faces when her or his age is revealed and the consequences a person faces when his or her sexual orientation is made known to people who may do horrible things to that person if they get that information.  Nobody is gonna get beaten and nailed to a rural fence in Wyoming because the people he was drinking with find out he's over forty.

I'm not so sure about that, ageism is rife in our society and people are routinely discriminated against for being too young or too old. Why do we insist on exposing peoples age instead of treating it as a private matter.

Are you suggesting that if Baird announced he was gay at a news conference, he may get beaten up by gay-bashers??? or is that Harper has told him that if he makes any public statement about his sexuality he would be expelled from the Conservative caucus? which is it?

I think Cheri DiNovo is making ther point that LGBT people in Canada - esp. young people need more positive role models and that gay people in positions of power have some responsibility to set an example. Unfortunately its clear that Baird's only role model as a gay man appears to be J. Edgar Hoover

Stockholm wrote:

Summer wrote:

Stockholm wrote:

Being gay is not just "a sex life" its an identity. 

This comment is absurd.  Replace "being gay" with "being straight" and ask whether the sentence makes sense.  A person's sexual orientation, like their race, religiion, language is but one facet of the person.

I never said that a person's sexual orientation was their ENTIRE identity, but its part of their identity. My point is that being LGBT or being straight is a part of a person's identity in a way that is analogous to being Black or Muslim or Francophone. Its not just a person's sex life - that makes it sound like being gay is just a sexual fetish like like being into having someone lick your toes during sex. The Supreme Court rationalized "reading in" protection for gays and lesbians in the charter of rights and freedoms on the grounds that being gay was comparable to being part of a racial or religious community that was an identifiable group that was often discriminated against.

I disagree completely with this.  You can make it part of your identity, but it surely isn't always the case.  There are many gay men who act/look/present themselves no differently than straight men.  The only difference being who they sleep with.  There is a lot of mischaracterizing and grouping of all gay people with those (of any orientation) who deviate from gender norms, particularly in the gay teen bullying literature, and I think we are seeing that here, too.

Getting back to the larger issue that sparked this which was Baird's muted but still extant criticism of the treatment of gays in Uganda and Russia. I think this is all a bit of convenient "pink-washing" on the part of the government. There are many countries around the world where people are viciously persecuted for being gay or lesbian - and in many of them the situation is far worse than it is in Russia or Uganda - yet we do NOT hear a peep out of Baird in those places.

Its very easy to attack Uganda and Russia. In the case of Uganda, its a tiny country in Africa with whom Canada has almost zero bilateral trade and on top of that its Africa and deep down a lot of people expect barbarism from the "dark continent" so its an easy mark. Then on to Russia, well we are not so happy these days with Russia, Putin seems not to be willing to play ball with the west over Syria etc...and Russia is being difficult with Canada over Arctic sovereignty etc...so its easy to attack Russia now that they are a "frenemy".

Notice that we NEVER see John Baird saying a word about Saudi Arabia where gays are actually routinely beheaded. Why? Because Canada imports oil from the Saudis and the Saudi government is considered a western ally. We also NEVER see Baird attacking the Karzai government in Kabul for its viciously anti-gay policies - i guess that would be inconvenient since Canada has spent billions of dollars and hundreds of lives keeping that regime in power. Apparently the most homophobic country on earth is Jamaica - we don't see baird saying a word in defense of gays in Jamaica - WHY? Because there are tons of Jamaican-Canadians and the Conservatives try to get vote among the more socially conservative elements in that community who attend evangelical churches and agree with the homophobic policies of the Jamaican government.

So before people start singing hosannas for John baird over his mild critcism of anti-gay policies in Russia and Uganda - take all of ther above into consideration there is a larger agenda at play.

But none of that has anything to do with why Baird should out himself, Stockholm, as CDN claims.