What, pray tell, is wrong with self-defense? If a woman, LGBT person or someone else who is physically vulnerable or especially subject to hate attacks faces an imminent threat in a parking lot at noon or a street corner at night and no police officer is in sight, why shouldn’t they have the means to protect their lives and bodies?

In reply to John, the problem with multiculturalism is not immigrants committing hate crimes–as he notes, these are mainly done by whites. The problem is that multiculturalism attacks the very idea of having a unifying national culture into which people can integrate, whether Canada-born or immigrants. The result is isolation, alienation, lack of trust–and, ironically, more racism.

Skin color does not make people Canadian. Sharing a common culture does.

I am a coastal liberal, and I strongly believe in the right to bear arms and believe in concealed weapons. A person is much less likely to attack you if they fear you may be armed. The police don’t do anything, usually, and they only come after the fact. It’s up to the populace to protect itself.

We apparently have to vote for the right-wing because only enlightened and civilized “white” people are gay tolerant. The only thing standing between the queer community and those scary African, Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants are…the Tories? The Christian Democrats? The Republicans?

Notwithstanding the fact that the majority of violent anti-gay hate crimes are committed by white males, this is utter rubbish. These are the same conservatives who’ve spent the last four decades opposing gay rights on the grounds that decadent, immoral homosexuals were a “threat” to the very Western values that they’re trying to sell as “more tolerant” today. It is a completely absurd and intellectually disingenuous argument.