Sechelt councillor Fred Taylor, who wants Coast governments to promote Gay Pride Awareness Days, is operating under the popular academic prejudice that assumes rural areas need ethical instruction/indoctrination from academics and big government.
The Christian heritage, on which our culture is derived, teaches that everyone has dignity gotten from a loving Creator, and therefore has the individual rights which have been protected in constitutions. This is the tradition which promotes a self-reliant, free and responsible citizenry, along with small government. The state - least of all a municipality - doesn't have the right, the responsibility, or the intelligence to tell its citizens what they should believe through programs of awareness or activism.
I don't look for cultural edification or moral guidance from a town councillor. I think that Taylor should concern himself with his more modest, but still important municipal duties such as figuring out the width of sidewalks, and garbage pickup days.
If Taylor re-read his town councillor job description, he would see it doesn't include appropriating municipal funds to promote personal causes like gay, transsexual, awareness days. If Taylor wants us country folk to be more like the big city, instead of pushing for a Pride Parade he could put his support behind the all-weather soccer pitch. If he finds he is still looking for causes for the cash in the kitty, then property taxes are too high in the first place.
David Rogers
Sechelt
