Were this only an April's fool's joke…

But, yesterday I was surfing the web, looking for images of Gay couples from the past, and stumbled on something sobering. A news article on human rights for our kind referenced a 1967 Supreme Court of Canada decision. It seems a man, Everett George Klippert, who apparently had no fear of the police, and no problem being Gay, casually mentioned the fact while talking to the RCMP (the Mounties, or the equivalent of our FBI) during the investigation of an unrelated matter. The forty-year-old mechanic was arrested, received no official information vis-à-vis a Miranda Rights warning, and "confessed" the obvious, that he had spent his entire adult life as a well-adjusted Gay person.

He was tried and convicted based upon his own statements, as no witnesses were called, nor indeed were any claims of 'harm' to others, or of public 'indecency' listed in the indictment. His sentence was begun, but when he asserted his sovereign rights not to be castrated, lobotomized, electro-shocked, or otherwise 'treated for his problem,' the court deemed him a "dangerous sex offender" and sentenced him to life in prison.

The Supreme Court of Canada affirmed that the Northwest Territorial government had the discretion to incarcerate a man for the rest of his life for simply being Gay. The Court shocked Canada. No individual person's rights to civil liberty were asserted if the government said they did not exist. The then Minster of Justice, Pierre Trudeau, immediately began the slow process of organizing what would finally pass in the early 1980s as Canada's Bill of Rights, The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while Trudeau was Prime Minister. The Charter did not include language prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, and as late as 1998 The Supreme Court of Canada was still grappling with people being fired based upon nothing more than their private lives.

The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) has archived most of their news broadcasts. The link below is to the national radio report filed the evening of the 1967 Court ruling.

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Digital+Archives/Politics/Rights+and+Freedoms/ID/1724049971/?sort=MostPopular

In the summer of 1971, Everett George Klippert was finally released from Territorial prison. This was only made possible by Trudeau's political bravery in pushing for the decimalization of consensual affectional expression between adults in 1969. Why Klippert continued to be jailed for two more years, is a mystery. At least in this instance, thanks to gusty leadership, Canada was far ahead of the US. Our Supreme Court only fully decriminalize being Gay in the summer of 2004!

The CBC also has a timeline of the LGTB rights movement in Canada. or
http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/features/timeline-of-gay-rights

So, as we sit-out these last few weeks, waiting for the Supreme Court to do it's job and apply the equal protection clause of our Constitution to same-sex couples, we had better pause and think about how far and how fast we have come.