Parent’s Voice, the municipal political party whose sole purpose revolved around revoking the Burnaby District School Board’s anti-homophobia and anti-bullying policy, has been soundly defeated.

Parent’s Voice was a staunch opponent to the existing school board’s policies acknowledging GLBT students—policies that demonstrably help reduce harassment and bullying that has historically led to suicide. Thankfully, voters instead re-elected the entire city council and school board who had introduced and stood by these important policies. The highest placing of all the Parent’s Voice candidates, by contrast, came in tenth place.

This thorough rejection rather aptly demonstrates just how much of a minority these vocal opponents to equal rights and protections for GLBT people really are. Still, it’s important not to dismiss their actions as inconsequential, so I wish to congratulate all the students and supporters that helped get people out to the polls and counter the sort of nonsense that Parent’s Voice stood for.

Here’s to Burnaby’s much safer schools!

• Voters reject Parents’ Voice [Xtra Vancouver]

Tourism BC has apologized after distributing a marketing brochure telling business owners in the province that they are not allowed to promote gay tourism in China.

The brochure, entitled How to Market Your Business in China, states that advertising to gay tourists in China was forbidden by the Chinese National Tourism Administration. The wee problem with this statement: Absolutely no such ban exists.

The province’s NDP tourism critic, Spencer Chandra Herbert, was left completely baffled. “Why was this language in the B.C. government brochure?” he asked.  ”Who put it in there and for what reason?”

The B.C. government responded by saying that the details of various marketing restrictions between Canada and China  (you know, the ones that don’t include any sort of gay marketing ban) are federal government territory, and the province had no role in its endorsement.

The province has since pulled the brochures.

• B.C. pulls brochure discouraging promoting gay tourism [CBC News]
• Taboo put on promoting B.C. gay tourism in China [CBC News]

A teacher in Burnaby, British Columbia has received a death threat over the school board’s proposal to adopt anti-homophobia policies designed to reduce incidents of bullying and make schools safter for GLBT students.

The letter, adorned with illustrations of bloody knives, reads as follows:

Must immediately withdraw POLICY #5.45
Adhere to the basic social principles!
You have no right to do so!
You want to destroy our children!
You are our enemy!
You will be shot!

Similar anti-homophobia policies have been implemented across B.C. without issue—and certainly no death threats—but some bizarre opposition in Burnaby has drawn the policy into the national spotlight. A one-issue political party with five candidates, The Parent’s Voice, was formed expressly to oppose the policy.

While I don’t expect that Parent’s Voice is officially responsible for the death threat, the alarmist language employed by the party certainly contributes to an atmosphere in which these types of reactions are encouraged. In a press release announced shortly before the letter was delivered, the group called the anti-bullying policies part of a “hidden political agenda” consisting of “homosexual propaganda” and “left-wing social engineering led by gay activists” to undermine parents.

The RCMP is investigating the letter.

• Teacher told ‘You will be shot!’ over anti-homophobia plan [CTV News]

A new civic party has been started in Burnaby, British Columbia in direct opposition to some new anti-homophobic bullying initiatives introduced by the Burnaby School Board trustees last June.

Calling themselves Parents’ Voice, the party is in opposition to the board’s existing anti-bullying policy on gender identity and sexual orientation, which they call “homosexual propoganda.” Actually, opposition might be a bit of an understatement. The issue is the party’s entire platform, and if elected, the party is vowing to make revoking the policy their only priority.

The party is running five candidates: Homara Ahmad, Charter Lau, Helen Ward, Gordon  World, and Long Xue.

Burnaby, incidentally, is the 14th school board in British Columbia to have adopted a sorely needed anti-homophobia and anti-bullying policy. While it’s important that these board policies remain in place, there is work underway to get the provincial government to adopt a consistent, province-wide policy. If that’s something you’d like to support, today is the last day to participate in the Purple Letter Campaign, so I encourage you to check it out!

• School gay policy sparks parents’ civic party [Burnaby Now]

Kari Simpson, an anti-gay activist and conservative radio host, has filed a police complaint against an anti-homophobia program designed to reduce the bullying of LGBT students and foster a safer atmosphere in schools.

Slap readers may remember Kari from the time she unsuccessfully launched a class-action human rights complaint against the B.C. Education Ministry for not introducing the “thousands” of schoolchildren who “suffer from homosexuality and other dysfunctional sexual orientations” to sexual re-orientation therapies. (Oddly enough, not one of these thousands of schoolchildren seemed interested in supporting Kari’s case—or in the universally rejected therapies—which was promptly thrown out by the BC Human Rights Tribunal.)

Anyway, Kari went away for a while. And that was nice. But she’s back now, spearheading an attempt to get the police to investigate Out in Schools, an anti-bullying initiative designed to “facilitate discussion with youth on bullying, homophobia, and stereotypes, [giving] youth a safe space to explore these issues.”

According to Kari, though, the anti-bullying motives behind Out in Schools is really just a clever front. The real reason for the anti-homophobia program, she says,  is to “dupe parents and introduce children into homosexist politics and pornography,” effectively recruiting children “into a sexualized culture of porn and games of debauchery.”

Oh, Kari. Where would this website be without you?

So let me respond to this allegation with the only appropriate question: Is Kari actually delusional, or does she merely have an intense psychological need to get in the media despite lacking the intelligence and talent necessary to accomplish this without doing something so astonishingly dumb that people can’t help but become fascinated by the mounds of wiggling, manifested stupidity?

If you have a guess, I’ll gleefully accept it via email, Twitter, and Facebook.

The police, by the way, have yet to comment on Kari’s complaint.

(Special thanks to Slap reader Christina for alerting me to this mind numbing stupidity!)

• Simpson files police complaint against anti-homophobia program [Xtra]

Housing discrimination has always been a little difficult to measure. Yet, even in a city as diverse and vibrant as Vancouver, it’s reported to happen. While it’s illegal to deny a gay couple housing simply because of their sexual orientation anywhere in Canada, proving this kind of discrimination is not easy; landlords don’t normally admit to such prejudice. (At least, not the cowardly ones.)

This is what makes a recent experiment conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia so interesting.

Two professors and 34 students designed an experiment around some housing application letters. The letters were all identical except for a small detail. Some letters indicated a heterosexual couple was interested in the property, while others indicated a gay male couple, a single parent, or a lesbian couple. The letters were then sent to 1,700 different landlords in the Vancouver area.

The results are unfortunate.

Letters that were from the gay male partners were 25% more likely to be rejected than letters from the straight couples—more than any other group. The next-most discriminated group, single parents, were 15% more likely to be rejected.

The results, naturally, depended on the neighbourhood in which the property was located. Vancouver’s West End, for example, which has traditionally been an area favoured by gays, had a much higher acceptance rate of all family types than elsewhere in the city.

Now, considering that Vancouver is a pretty a diverse city, it probably exhibits less discrimination than elsewhere in Canada. In this sense, 25% is a pretty worrying statistic, wouldn’t you say?

The results of the study have been published in the August edition of the academic journal Social Problems.

• Gay renters face discrimination [The Vancouver Sun]
• No welcome mat for gays, single parents: Study [The Province]