Give Respect And You'll Receive It

"I don't have anything against the gay community as a pastor. I don't hate them. My concern was I was in a public place, Tim Hortons, with my family and my children and if they had turned around they would have seen this nearly pornographic image."

Reverend Eric Revie, assistant pastor at the Pentecostal Glad Tidings Community Church in Blenheim, Ontario, east of Windsor, is accepting of gays. He has no problem, he explained, seeing them express affection in public. His complaint was that what he thought was a young man and a young woman were deeply entrenched in a very conspicuous display of love-making in a very public space.

"They were straddling each other ... and really making out", he explained further. And so he did what anyone in his circumstance might do, he asked the store manager to convey his concern to the couple, to ask them to "tone it down", in front of his children. This is exactly what the manager did, and asked the two women furthermore, to leave the premises.

"She said that it was a family-friendly environment and what we were doing wasn't acceptable. We weren't doing anything wrong. I can see if we were making out, if we were fully going at it with children there, but we weren't", protested 25-year-old Riley Duckworth, of the display that she and her friend, 23-year-old Patricia Pattenden were being accused of.

Reverend Revie's story in describing what he witnessed to his great discomfiture doesn't quite match Ms. Duckworth's version. According to Reverend Revie, the couple sat on a bench with their tongues locked together, their hands inside each other's pants. Ms. Duckworth mentioned she had noticed Reverend Revie staring at them before the store manager confronted them.

Later, the manager apologized, and invited the women back to the store. The couple decided to get in touch with the head of Alphabet Community Centre in London, Ontario, a gay and transgendered group, asking assistance in filing a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The head of the Alphabet Centre, Michelle Boyce, wrote an account of the story on Facebook.

That resulted in an outraged response from supporters, from as far as California, encouraging local organizers to plan a protest backed up by over 500 angry online supporters. A transgendered woman, Mary Van Speybroeck, initiated a petition against Tim Hortons, then thought better of it after having spoken to Reverend Revie.

"For me, the credibility is gone. As a member of the LGBTQ community, I'd like equal rights as much as anyone, but not at the expense of honesty", she said. Her view was also that the ensuing protests based on a confused and not very reliable telling of the tale had the potential of sparking a backlash, taking attention from legitimate issues of discrimination and violence suffered by her community.

"It's just something that should never have been brought up in the first place. There are legitimate things we can be protesting." Teaching respect for the entire community might be a good start. An utter lack of social sensitivity to the shocked responses of other members of society faced with the propensity of many gays to act out their fantasies in public is not the way to garner support.

In-your-face ignorance and contempt doesn't make for good relations.