[URBAN NOTE] Michael Coren (@michaelcoren) on why he will be attending Pride Toronto

[rfmcdonald]

In his Torontoist essay "An Epiphany, With Pride", Michael Coren explains why he will be attending Pride this year. More power to him for making his transition and being honest about it.

Yesterday I tweeted something I thought fairly bland and innocuous: I plan to attend this year’s Pride parade in Toronto. Anybody who has followed my writing and broadcasting over the past two years shouldn’t have been particularly surprised. But my goodness, the reaction certainly surprised me. There were thousands of re-tweets, likes, follows and comments. There were, of course, the usual attacks and insults too, but 90 per cent of what I saw moved me profoundly.

[. . .]

For many years I was known as a high-profile opponent of same-sex marriage and some of the aspirations of the LGBTQ community; I even won a major broadcasting award for taking the “no” side in a debate on the subject. I like to think that my arguments were never hateful, and I certainly maintained warm relationships with several gay people. But looking back, I almost certainly enabled hatred by giving an intellectual veneer to the arguments against equality. There’s no way of sugarcoating this. I was wrong, did wrong, wrote wrong, spoke wrong. I’ve apologized numerous times and although contrition can become laborious after a while, actions and consequences are as important as words.

I’m not going to play the martyr here, but after “coming out” in favour of equal marriage, particularly as a fairly prominent Christian journalist and author, I lost four regular newspaper columns, a television spot and all of my speeches; the bulk of my income. I was threatened, my children’s Facebook pages were trolled and they were insulted, I was accused of being an adulterer, a thief, a liar and of being blackmailed by my gay lover–I wish he’d tell me who he is! I’m not looking for any sympathy, but I have paid a price. That said, the discrimination and hate that I have encountered is only a fraction of what thousands of LGBTQ-identified individuals face, and the experience has given me more perspective.

The reasons why I changed my views are many, diverse, and complex. At root it was because and certainly not in spite of my Christian faith. Love triumphed over legalism, and the inclusion preached by Christ became far more important to me than the doctrines of a church. In fact I left Roman Catholicism and became a happy and content liberal Anglican. Beyond faith, however, was experience and maturity. I simply could not reconcile the joy and tolerance I saw in the gay community with the views I was supposed to hold. The more progressive I became, the more gratitude I received from gay men and women and the more visceral hatred from their opponents. It radicalized me of course; it could not do otherwise.