Take this John Ibbitson article in today's Globe and Mail:
Mr. Van Loan was commenting on the Commons vote Wednesday night that approved in principle a private members bill to shut down the registry. He will be belatedly releasing a report today in support of the registry. His government ignored the report. The minister also ignored the truth that police forces insist they value the registry.
But all that is beside the political point. The political point is that the registry is popular with Canadians. About two thirds of them want the registry retained, according to a 2006 Ipsos Reid poll. More recent data doesn't appear to be available, but pollster Darrell Bricker says it is unlikely attitudes have changed since then.
Within that poll are stark contrasts. Urban voters support the registry, and any other measure that limits gun violence. Rural voters oppose the registry, seeing in it an insidious government conspiracy to pry rifles and shotguns out of hunters' and farmers' infuriated hands.
Eighty per cent of us live in cities. If the House of Commons were representative of the nation, the gun registry would survive; the voters of greater Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver would insist on it.
Now just go through, and mentally swap "gun registry" with "faggot marriages", swap "urban" with "religious", "rural" with "poofter", and "2006" with "1999".
Go on, try it, its fun. Here was a legislature trying to push through a narrow agenda only opposed by the people who are impacted by it, and its a crime against nature.
Yet when that same legislative body tried to restrict marriage to one man and one woman, a mere clarification that only prevented a few activists from trying to make a false claim about their sick perverted lifestyle, it was an outrage from the likes of pillow-biter John Ibbitson.
