Trudeau Apologizes to the LGBTQ Community

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Dec 2017

RE: Sexual Minorities Deserved Apology

The Hamilton Spectator editorialized in favor of Justin Trudeau's apology to the LGBTQ community.  What went unreported is that the moral picture is not as clear and one-sided as Trudeau, the sycophant media, and the LGBTQ community would have you believe.

While I am generally in agreement with the tenor of the editorial, it was in some respects less nuanced that it ought to have been.

Permit me to observe that when a Conservative government does something wrong, it is a taken as sign of the evils of right-wing conservativism.  But when Liberal government does something wrong, it is Canada’s fault.  And yesterday, that is how it was presented. (Pace Jonah Goldberg.)

The most recent apology concerns the treatment of homosexuals in government service from the 1950s to the 1990s.  In those days, a country called the Soviet Union existed and its heads of state for the period in question were named Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev.  They were on the other side of the cold war, and Canada was intimately connected with the defence of North America against nuclear attack.  The Soviet Union actively spied on Canada, as the Gouzenko affair proved, and spies supplied the Soviet Union with the secrets of America’s atomic bomb.  The threat of atomic war was real.

In addition, homosexuality made one a security risk in those days because public exposure as a homosexual was highly embarrassing and considered quite a shameful thing.  If the Soviets discovered that someone in, say, the Communications Security Establishment was homosexual, or that a lowly communications clerk aboard a navy ship was homosexual, then blackmail of those individuals could lead to untold intelligence riches for our enemy.  Security against spying was why the government was so concerned in those days about “who one slept with and who one chose to love.”  (You would not think it funny if your secret Revenue Canada file was leaked to the Russians in order that someone else's secret be kept secret by them.)

And it was not that these people were fired on account of their homosexuality, but on account of their lying about it.  Joining the Canadian Forces in those days (and now) required an extensive personal interview and the completion of a detailed personal questionnaire about oneself, at the end of which one swore that the answers given were truthful.  Well, if one of those questions concerned one's sexual predilections and past practices, and in order to get enrolled one lied on the form, well that is cause for dismissal from the service – for lying on the application.

The people being apologized to yesterday lied somewhere, somehow, in order to get into the position they were in, and from which they were released.

So the moral here is not as clear-cut as “they were done wrong, period.”  They had to do something wrong too for that “wrong” to be done to them.  Namely, lie.

Nowadays, homosexuality is not the publicly shameful thing it once was, and for that reason should no longer constitute a secret whose threatened exposure could blackmail one into treasonous conduct.  It is only from today’s perspective and with things taken out of context that we can accept Mr. Trudeau’s shameless virtue-signalling yesterday as due simply and on the merits presented.  The actual facts make the moral situation much more complex and the moral responsibility less one-sided.

The larger lesson, that governments should be careful, is one to which progressives utterly ignore, and only observe in others in the breach.

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