Don't Be Fooled the Cons Are Still the Bigot Party

I see the Cons are trying to make us believe that dropping their long held opposition to same-sex marriage means that they are now a new/nouveau party.

The Conservative Party gave itself a makeover, donning a more moderate and modern face as grassroots members voted overwhelmingly to ditch the traditional definition of marriage from the party’s policy book.

But let nobody be fooled, because I watched the same-sex debate.

And what I saw couldn't be more horrifying.

As one religious fanatic after the other went up to the NO mike and spewed out the most bigoted garbage.

One delegate had called the resolution “an attack on our values and principle . . . family, faith and community.” Another opponent said while it protects religious institutions, it didn’t protect individual conscience rights. He said Christian bakers would not be able to refuse a request for a gay couple’s wedding cake, “leaving them open to litigation.” 

Still another said support for traditional marriage was not about discrimination against gays, but “man-woman marriage is about children knowing and being raised by both a mother and a father,” he said.

Take a good look, these are some of the faces of their rabid religious base....



There were hundreds of them at the convention, and no doubt tens of thousands of them in the party data base. And whatever the Cons say, they still need people like them to help fill up their voter's pool, the shallowest of any party, and send them hate dollars every month.

So they will have to keep pandering to them in other ways, and as a result no serious gay or progressive Canadian could ever trust them.

Not when their hapless leader Rona Ambrose is still playing to that base by making "jokes" about how Justin Trudeau considers himself Canada's first female prime minister. 



The party may have wished that reporters didn’t witness one comment in particular from interim leader Rona Ambrose, in which she seemed to take a swipe at Justin Trudeau by joking about him being Canada’s first female prime minister.

Which as Susan Delacourt points out, plays into the Cons longstanding narrative.

“There has been kind of a gender element to their criticism of Trudeau since he landed on the stage,” she said.

“These are things that usually were said about women politicians, and it’s interesting the ways in which Trudeau has taken them on himself,” Delacourt said. “In many ways, what Ambrose said last night, I think inadvisably, was that it’s a bad thing to be a woman in politics.”

And only makes Ambrose look like a misogynist, or as I have always called her, a village idiot...



Who among other things doesn't seem to understand that challenging traditional male images was one of the reasons Trudeau won his large majority.

According to a new study, the 2015 election focused on the manliness of federal party leaders, with Trudeau often portrayed as subordinate in a field of aggressive alpha males.

But the study's co-author Jerald Sabin, a research associate with the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation, said that dynamic may have helped Trudeau cast himself as an agent of change in the race.

"I think the Canadian electorate got somewhat fatigued with the aggressive, angry, tough approach and took a different direction," Sabin told Robyn Bresnahan on CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning.

For it not only set Trudeau apart from his more traditional opponents, and helped reinforce his image as the candidate of change...



It also gave him the last laugh.

"Our Conservative friends are also meeting this weekend. They're in Vancouver where, among other things, they're debating the merits of marriage equality," he said. "In 2016, more than a decade after we made same-sex marriage legal in Canada. Better late than never. 

 "Who knows … 10 years from now, they might finally be willing to admit that climate change is real. Or that tax cuts for rich people don't help the middle class. Or that government shouldn't legislate what women can wear on their heads."

And since most younger Canadians feel the same way, it practically guarantees that Justin Trudeau will continue to have the future on his side.

While the Cons will remain stranded in the past...



The long shadow of Harper is still hanging over the party.

It's still going nowhere.

And it's still heading for oblivion...

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