Just about 50 years ago, a Canadian was locked up and forgotten. He’d stolen nothing and hurt nobody, but a Supreme Court Justice upheld the sentence because if Everett Klippert were released, he would continue to have sex with “consenting adult males.”
During the Cold War, the federal government devoted security resources and recruited a university professor to invent a Clockwork Orange-like machine designed to detect homosexuality. Government-funded gaydar seems funny until we consider the thousands of lives harmed by the hatefulness underlying that stupid device.
We applaud Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for apologizing this week and bringing a national shame out of the closet and into all our houses.
There are pundits who will complain that this human sexuality stuff wasn’t a problem in the past. Of course, unjust laws and systemic discrimination were always problems. All that’s changed is our tolerance for ignoring them.
Much like the damage of a flood is only revealed after the water is gone, the cruelty that guided Canada is still evident in the rates of depression and self-harm among our LGBTQ youth.
We admit that a head of state can appear ridiculous when making amends for historical injustice while contemporary injustice festers. But Trudeau wasn’t saying sorry to ghosts sequestered in old textbooks, he was apologizing to flesh and blood Canadians who remember losing jobs, being entrapped by police and shamed in newspapers. And our prime minister wasn’t apologizing empty-handed, either, as the government may spend $145 million compensating victims and guarding against future oppression.
Let’s hope for a kinder, more merciful future in Canada. And let’s hope this apology becomes as historically important as the injustice it finally addressed.
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