Toronto's gay pride parade is set to launch its raucous stage on the city streets yet again. The city's gay, transgendered and etc. community prepared once again to present their colourful, raunchy and for many - among them gays themselves - totally inappropriate celebration of themselves as differently gendered. Who cares that men and women have gender orientations outside the mainstream?

Most people are indifferent to gayness as a fact of life. It is, after all, a fact of life, and as such accepted as an indelible presence and reality in peoples' lives. In all other respects gays and transgendered are just like any other human being. They have like needs, emotional and practical, and the general community is more than prepared to recognize that. We have more in common than what sets us apart, obviously.

We have come that far. Making life more bearable for gays, and for those who are not, lifting the burden of suspicion. But the burden of being accounted among the 'homophobic' within society remains. Levelled recklessly and spitefully against those in the straight community who view lavish gay pride parades with distaste at their uncivil tawdriness.

Perhaps tawdry and uncivil might be acceptable in a spirit of light-heartedness, but gay pride parades transcend even those parameters with their sexual exhibitionism and in-your-face lewd gestures and acting-out. Not everyone responds positively to that kind of scenario, and people prefer to absent themselves from the vulgar display.

Toronto's new Mayor, Rob Ford, evidently is one of those. Out of courtesy and diplomacy he asserted a need to respect his own family's tradition, by showing up for Canada Day at the family cottage. He has been rewarded by slanderous nomenclature and threats to his political future. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community's celebration of themselves is not all good-natured fun and games.

They have slid into politics of a nasty and utterly unforgiving kind, slurring the State of Israel, which although it recognizes gay rights and gay marriage and hosts gay pride parades of its own, nonetheless incurs the wrath of the LGBT community who appear to prefer to support regimes and social/cultural/religious countries that penalize gays with violent persecution and death sentences.

Having successfully managed, with the help and goodwill of the straight community to set the record straight about homosexuality, and having achieved equality and security recognition under the law, it seems the LGBT community is determined to entirely blanket public society with its silly little campaigns geared to wear away societal discrimination expressed as good taste and respect for others.