International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia

Please watch this video and share it. This is still an important issue in Ontario. On Tuesday May 23rd one Catholic school board is having a vote to ban GSA's claiming that GSA's are a threat to Catholic teachings. We need to merge the Catholic and public school boards. 

Action Alert: Stop Passage of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill

Conservative lawmakers in Uganda have revived the Anti-Homosexuality bill that made headlines last year. A vote on the bill could happen in the next 72 hours, which is why an outcry from the international community is critical now.

Most notably, the bill would punish “aggravated homosexuality”–meaning homosexual activity by “serial offenders” or those who are HIV positive–with the death penalty.

To take action, sign a letter directed at Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, who can stop the bill’s passage with a veto.

Sign the petition: http://www.housingworks.org/blogs/detail/action-alert-stop-passage-of-ugandas-anti-homosexuality-bill/

10-10-10 Our Wedding Day! (and the wedding day of many others too)

I've been wondering how to tell you the story of our upcoming wedding on 10-10-10 here at the Daye. Well, this morning I woke up today and found out that apparently the 10.10.10 wedding is not exactly an original idea so I decided to start our story today.

The wedding chambers at Toronto City Hall is so booked for weddings on October 10, 2010 that they have moved their weddings to a nearby hotel. According to the Star it is "Wedding Perfection". The perfection part comes from the number 10 supposedly being perfect in the Chinese calendar.  I don't know anything about that but I do know that 101010 is the perfect binary number and computer language for the number 42 which we all know is (according to Douglas Adams) the answer to life, the universe and everything!

Our story really has nothing to do with 42 or 10-10-10. It all started on 10-10-04 when we happened to meet. Conveniently we just happened to be on the Eiffel tower in Paris on our fourth anniversary of meeting and David asked me to marry him. I said yes and we set the date: 10-10-09!

YES, 10-10-09. Shortly thereafter we realized good friends of ours were getting married on 10-09-09 and that most of our friends would therefore probably be hungover and tired for our wedding.  It was the right decision. I think we finally went to bed at 6 am following that wedding!

The solution; wait a year. The result of this decision is well; 42. 

So, there you have the back story. This is the first official post about our wedding on Sunday which has a Moulin Rouge theme, which is my favorite movie and a great tie-in to getting engaged in Paris.

We will be leaving on Tuesday the 12th for a trip around Europe and I will be posting about our wedding and our trip over the next few weeks. I hope you will enjoy the story.  The picture to the left is David and I in Prague in 2008, it was on this trip that we became engaged (on 10-10-08).

It Gets Better: Dan and Terry

From Dan's column about Billy Lucas:

"Billy Lucas was just 15 when he hanged himself in a barn on his grandmother's property. He reportedly endured intense bullying at the hands of his classmates—classmates who called him a fag and told him to kill himself. His mother found his body.... I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

"But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

"Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids."

Read Dan's entire column here:  http://tinyurl.com/3xmu4le

Francis Bacon and the Evolution of Early Modern Homophobia

Author: Chuck Griffith

The term Homophobia is less than one hundred years old.[1] Before that, distaste for homosexual behavior was cloaked within the vernacular of Early Modern England, especially 17th century London, by terms such as "buggery" and "sodomy." By the early 18th century, men who exclusively had sex with men were deemed "he-whores."[2] Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method and very much a man ahead of his time in many ways, nevertheless shows that he believed "masculine love" to be an "unlawful threat" in The New Atlantis (written in 1610-14 and published in 1623). In other words, this inspiring hero of the Royal Society would keep anything feminine, or effeminate, at arm's length.

His written protestations against homosexuality were not evident in his real life, however. Despite the fact that his public career ended in disgrace in 1621,[3] Bacon's writings went on to influence the Royal Society and their expansion of the scientific method into an experimental philosophy that is still practiced today in modern medicine around the world. In 1667, forty-one years after Bacon, the founder of the scientific method and the English essay, was eulogized by one of his apprentices who claimed that his "bounty transcends a father's natural love"[4], Thomas Sprat, a historian of the Royal Society, would credit Bacon and his "noble labours in that philosophy by a vast treasure of admirable imaginations" as someone of "new philosophy" greater than that of the Greeks.[5]