[LINK] "Grants and drag queens don't mix"

[rfmcdonald]

Xtra! and the Star and the Globe and Mail have all covered the hostile reaction to the Conservative government's decision not to fund Toronto's annual Pride festival. The government says its decision wasn't motivated by homophobia, rather by a desire to spread funding of community festivals more evenly across Canada. But when the conservative National Post dissents, you know that to be a transparent excuse.

According to some senior Conservatives, the decision to deny Toronto's Pride Week funding from the government's Marquee Tourism Events Program was cast in stone last summer. This week's confirmation that the gay-themed celebration would be frozen out this year only made it public.

So intense was the caucus backlash last July against a publicity photo of then-tourism minister Diane Ablonczy awarding $400,000 to a Pride committee group, including busty transvestites, the story goes, that the order to Industry Canada was to design a new process that would ensure the event would not qualify again.

"They've been on top of this since way back then to make sure this doesn't happen again," says one Tory close to the Industry Minister. "They had a year to restructure the program in a way that would exclude Toronto Pride."

But that's just one version. Other senior Tories have others. One posited that Prime Minister Stephen Harper enjoys stoking social issues that divide the Liberal caucus.

[. . .]

Still others interviewed sense the invisible hands of Mr. Harper's chief of staff, Guy Giorno, a passionate Catholic, and Darrel Reid, a senior policy advisor and former president of the evangelical group Focus on the Family Canada.

And so it appears even senior Tories aren't quite sure what the Tories were thinking by helping to reanimate old fears of a theologically driven "hidden agenda" by appearing to single out the gay community for selective neglect.