Sorry Rob, gay pride parade is part of the job

Macleans:

From kissing babies to sitting through interminable public ceremonies, the cost of being a politician in a democracy is that you have to submit to a handful of ritual humiliations simply because the people expect it. The prime minister of Canada has to pretend to like hockey. The American president has to attend church and otherwise act like he believes in God. Even Kim Jong Il has to feign interest in mundane things. As for the mayor of Toronto, he has to march in the annual Pride parade that celebrates the diversity of human sexuality in the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.

The current holder of that office, Rob Ford, does not agree. He has made it clear that he has no intention of attending the annual parade, which often takes place over the July 1 long weekend. And despite being strongly encouraged to change his mind by virtually every newspaper columnist and editorialist in the land, Ford is digging in. Yet oddly enough, it is the mayor’s own bizarre recalcitrance that forms the strongest argument for why he needs to be there.

Toronto is no longer the city it was in 1981, when Toronto police raided four gay bathhouses and arrested over 300 men. Pride evolved out of the mass protests that were a direct political response to those raids, aimed at defending the rights of the city’s gay community. Today, it’s a 10-day festival of arts and culture, attracting corporate sponsors that include TD Bank, Budweiser, Pizza Pizza, and CTV. Whatever stigma there ever was in a corporation being associated with the LGBT community, it is fading fast. We might be tempted to go even further, and argue that the day the mayor no longer needs to attend Pride will mark the utopian end point of that trajectory—the normalization, even banalization, of the lifestyle of what was once a persecuted and marginalized community.

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