To the Editor,
Re: Council rescinds motion to ban event, July 8.
In case you thought it couldn’t get any worse than eight out of nine council members being totally ignorant of the fundamental principles of the Canadian constitution, you were wrong.
In an inept effort to reverse their attack on free speech by arbitrarily banning a conference, no doubt using their apparent ESP powers to invoke pre-emptive censorship, council made an awful situation even worse.
After repealing the ill-conceived motion, instead of agreeing to the proposed independent investigation, council refused to disclose how much all this mess has cost the innocent taxpayers.
The mayor stated, “Council could not release the information due to a non-disclosure agreement.”
Absolute poppycock. The taxpayers are stuck with paying for all this and are entitled to know the full extent of their financial bailout.
Gary KorpanNanaimo
To the Editor,
Re: Council rescinds motion to ban event, July 8.
How is it possible that our tax money can be paid out, in this latest case, to an organization, and we are not allowed to know how much the amount is? It seems that more and more, Nanaimo and its councillors feel that our cash is theirs alone, and that they can do whatever they like with it. I have started to imagine city employees and councillors dancing around a cauldron full of taxpayers’ cash, asking, “where can we toss this money to, so that a few people will love us?” Never mind the rest of us suckers.
John ScorgieNanaimo
To the Editor,
Re: Council rescinds motion to ban event, July 8.
I am concerned that your story says that “members of the public, including the Christian community, have raised concerns” about council’s earlier action in banning the event. This implies that all Christians support homophobia. This is not the case. I am proud to belong to the United Church, which in 1988 decided that a person’s sexual orientation was not a relevant issue in deciding their suitability for ministry or membership in the United Church. This was not an easy decision and was only arrived at after much study, debate and prayer; a number of people left the United Church because of that decision and not all United Church members support it today. It is based on our belief in justice rather than a legalistic interpretation of scripture.
I grew up in and around Nanaimo in the ’40s and so was thoroughly indoctrinated in the crude homophobia of the day. We all need to outgrow racism, sexism and homophobia and it took me some time to grow out of this.
Today, of course, that kind of discrimination has a nice religious veneer and LGBT people can be targeted under the name of religious freedom. But let’s not confuse it with Christianity.
Jim Manlyvia e-mail