Checking out the university homepage this morning, what in the world did I see plastered on the front page for all to gape at but this story (“Archbishop Thomas Collins, MA’73, elevated to cardinal,” Jan. 12)
So, I wonder, if one of Western’s alumni becomes Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan – yes, they still have those titles – will that be front page news, too? (It is a serious question, even though I know Cardinal Collins to be an honest, honourable and decent man, because it raises a broader and more general question of basic sensitivity to the larger contexts of our community.)
As a queer man working with queer students and their allies, this insensitivity is beyond contemptible. We’ve just finished a year where teenage queer kids have been struggling for even basic recognition of their humanity at Catholic schools in Ontario, a struggle against not only the school boards, so-called teachers and a waffling minister of education, but against the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Ontario. And Western is supposed to be proud that one of its own has joined the inner circle of Benny and the Bullies over in Rome?
For two decades the Vatican and its henchman have thwarted HIV/AIDS interventions in the majority of the world in pursuit of their vicious notion of Catholic virtue. And Western is crowing that one of their own has been promoted by these criminals?
This is breathtaking in its duplicity, a depraved piece of empty branding to add to the stinking pile of crowing and deceit that runs this place. But more than that, it is about some 13-year-old queer kid in his bedroom staring at a bottle of pills and hearing the echoes of this pontifical horror show telling him, as he has recently, yet again, that who he is, what his basic humanity is, is against the moral order, is the gravest threat facing the world today.
And this is something to cheer about?
This sickens me in more ways than I can even count.
Douglass St. Christian