17 Feb Supine press gallery goes after the leaker who did their job

Earlier today I criticized several Nova Scotia media outlets — The Chronicle-Herald, The CBC, AllNovaScotia.com — for ignoring The Coast’s breathtaking scoop about Mayor Peter Kelly’s mishandled duties as executor of a friend’s estate. The omission makes them look small.

That’s nothing compared to the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s competition to out @vikileaks30, the anonymous tweeter who exposed details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ messy divorce. It’s increasingly clear that many of the same reporters who are now hellbent to expose @vikileaks30 knew Toews had fathered a child after cheating on his wife for years, but helped him keep that secret.

They will of course protest that divorce is a private matter, and reporting such messy details is unseemly, if not downright un-Canadian.

No it’s not. Not when the public figure has cloaked himself in family values, fought to deny other Canadians the right to marry their loved ones, and compared gay wedding ceremonies to Satanic rituals.

When @vikileaks30 finally did expose Toews’s hypocrisy, did the press gallery lapdogs journalists finally do their job and get on that story? No. They responded instead by going after the leaker, thus moving the story away from Toews’ Christianist deceit. Their helpful work paved the way for Toews to spin the story further with demands for a Parliamentary investigation of @vikileaks30’s alleged use of a House of Commons computer connection.

As Georgia Strait blogger Charlie Smith has reminded us, there is one journalist who had the integrity to expose Toews two years ago. In March, 2010, US sex advice columnist Dan Savage, and the originator of the “It Gets Better” campaign, wrote the following:

[A] better example of conservative batshittery would be Vic Toews. Canada’s unofficial “Minister of Family Values,” member of parliament Toews—surprise!—doesn’t like the gays because we’re a threat to the family and the institution of marriage. Toews has described gay marriage ceremonies as satanic “Black Masses” and insisted that adding gays and lesbians to existing Canadian civil rights statutes would bring the “jackboot of fascism [down] on the necks of our people.”

You know where this is going, right?

It turned out that Toews—who once warned that gay marriage could lead to polygamy—was cheating on his wife of 25 years. After getting a much younger woman pregnant, Toews wound up getting divorced. Another marriage destroyed not by gays stomping around in fabulous jackboots, but by another straight “Christian” shitfuck politician slamming his dick into someone who isn’t his wife.

Toews’s affair became public two years ago, but the scandal didn’t destroy him—he became minister of public safety this January—because the Canadian press sniffed that Toews’s affair and divorce were private.

Excuse me, Canadian-press pansies, but a politician who scares up votes attacking the private lives of others, a politician who insists that other people are out to destroy his marriage, can’t be allowed to hide behind “my private business!” when it turns out that the only threat to the politician’s marriage was the politician’s own greasy cock.

Here’s hoping that all straight folks everywhere one day realize that anti-gay ravers come in just two flavors: assholes who are externalizing their own internal struggles against homosexual desires (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Charlie Crist, Joseph Ratzinger, et al.) and assholes who are attempting to compensate for and/or draw attention away from their own moral shortcomings (David Vitter, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Vic Toews, et al.).

Canadian-press pansies, please take note.