The Wildrose Party will not create legislation on contentious social issues if elected to power on Monday.
That’s the mantra leader Danielle Smith trots out every time one of her archconservative candidates goes off the campaign script, or has seamy comments from the past exposed to the voting public.
She calls these insensitive comments towards minorities “bozo eruptions.”
Smith’s goal is to keep public discussion focused wholly on areas where she thinks she can defeat the longstanding Progressive Conservative government.
That is chiefly managing Alberta’s buoyant economic growth and controlling government spending.
But bad pennies keep turning up.
At the Red Deer election forum on Tuesday, gay bashing was the focus of the first two questions from the audience.
One woman told about a teenage friend who was beaten by a group of young thugs because he was believed to be a homosexual.
That brutal attack, she said, came from boys who attended a Christian school.
Responses from the two Wildrose candidates — Nathan Stephan and Randy Weins — were both sober and sympathetic.
Their problem is intemperate remarks from candidates who are running for public office under the Wildrose banner and don’t share tolerant views.
Red Deer’s final election forum was staged on the same day one of Canada’s leading activists for homosexual rights was murdered.
Raymond Taavel, 49, was beaten to death early Tuesday morning outside a gay bar in Halifax.
He died while apparently trying to break up a fight between two other men.
His alleged assailant was a homophobic 32-year-old man who was released unsupervised from a Halifax psychiatric hospital on Monday evening, and never returned when his scheduled hour of freedom was up.
Taavel, 49, was a writer and community organizer.
He was also a devout Christian, a trait he shared with many members of the Wildrose Party.
For too many of them, however, neither Christian charity, human decency nor respect for the law seems to extend to folks who are different from them.
Last weekend, Ron Leech, a Wildrose candidate, told a radio station that he had an advantage over political opponents in his Calgary riding because he is white, and therefore “can speak to the whole community.”
He later retracted and “clarified” his previous remarks.
That episode came shortly after a year-old blog posting by a homophobic Christian pastor running for Wildrose went viral.
Allan Hunsperger, who is contesting an Edmonton riding, wrote last June that homosexuality should not be accepted just because gays are born that way.
Instead, gays should know that they will spend forever “in the lake of fire, hell, a place of eternal suffering,” he wrote.
Hunsperger is the founder of Christian Heritage Schools. He believes Alberta’s public schools — which his party will manage, if elected to power on Monday — are “godless.”
Wildrose Party Leader Smith does not share that view. She supports homosexual rights, including gay marriage.
Clearly, many Wildrose supporters are 180 degrees at odds with her on those issues.
The battle they would like to renew was lost a long time ago.
It was fought between a gay young Alberta man and a Christian school.
Delwin Vriend worked at a Christian college in Edmonton.
When college administrators found out about his sexual orientation, they asked him to resign, saying homosexuality was incompatible with their religious doctrine.
Vriend refused.
The college fired him and Vriend sued.
Eventually his case made its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
In April 1998, the high court ruled in Vriend’s favour.
That victory legally entrenched rights for homosexuals across Canada.
Some Wildrose members and candidates want to turn back the clock.
Every time their Neanderthal voices go off message to reveal what’s truly in their hearts, party leader Smith trots out the boilerplate defence: the Wildrose will not craft legislation on contentious social issues.
It’s a gambit to deflect attention from some of their more retrograde members, to tamp down suspicions about hidden agendas, to return debate to key areas where the party has the best chance of defeating the longstanding Progressive Conservative majority.
But inflammatory social issues will not go away.
“Discrimination against homosexuals is an historical, universal, notorious and indisputable social reality,” the Supreme Court said in its 1998 judgment.
Fourteen years on, for too many gays in Alberta and beyond, that grim reality has not changed.
For the Wildrose Party, a pledge not to pass new laws that will make their lives worse is not enough.
Any political party that is not fully committed to improving tolerance, respect and protection for all citizens does not deserve to become Alberta’s chief lawmaker next week.
Joe McLaughlin is the retired former managing editor of The Red Deer Advocate.