Canadian Same-sex Marriage Bill Passes Commons Vote

June 28, 2005.  Members of Parliament have passed a divisive and contentious bill, putting Canada one step closer to becoming just the third country in the world to sanction same-sex marriage.

After years of debate, the House of Commons put Bill C-38 to a vote after its third and final reading late Tuesday night.

With the Liberals enjoying the support of almost all the Bloc Quebecois and NDP MPs, the legislation passed easily in a 158 to 133 vote.

Now, it will take Senate approval and royal assent to make Canada the third country in the world, after the Netherlands and Belgium, to officially recognize same-sex marriage.

"(This) is about the Charter of Rights,'' Prime Minister Paul Martin said before the vote was cast Tuesday.

"We are a nation of minorities. And in a nation of minorities, it is important that you don't cherry-pick rights. A right is a right and that is what this vote tonight is all about."

Gay bookstore that challenged censorship laws is up for sale

'Time to pass torch,' say Little Sister's owners

VANCOUVER– 21 April 2008. They've been bombed three times, received death threats and stood before the red-robed justices of the Supreme Court of Canada.

No, Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth are not killers or terrorists. The soft-spoken Vancouver men sell books.

And in some peoples' eyes, Deva says, that made the gay owners of Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium dangerous.

"Because we were (openly gay) and we were very, very blatant about being open. . . . We were threatening to homophobes," Deva says.

Only two years after the store opened in 1983, the owners took on a fight that bolstered and exhausted them, lasting until just last year and challenging Canada's censorship laws.

After 23 years of fighting Canada Customs' seizures of books bound for the gay and lesbian bookshop, the partners have put Little Sister's up for sale.

It's time to do something else, Deva says as he plans to get a choir booked for the store's 25th anniversary celebrations.

"It's probably time to pass on the torch, hopefully, to some younger, energetic people who are willing to work with our store," he says. "I'm not in a rush. We're going to take our time."

The fight against Customs put the store at the forefront of the battle against censorship in Canada.

Among books seized were Jean Genet's Querelle, Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant, Joe Orton's Prick Up Your Ears, The Joy of Gay Sex and The Joy of Lesbian Sex.

With support from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and writers such as Pierre Berton and Jane Rule, the store wouldn't back down.

"I think it's our tenacity. We just wouldn't give up and came back again and again at them from every angle we could figure out."

But after all the court battles, Deva believes Canada Customs has developed a respect for the gay community's literature and imagery.

"They know that . . . when they make a sort of pronouncement on a book that they may well have to defend that. We still disagree with the process but it's certainly fairer than it was 20 years ago."

But that's not the legacy Deva wants. "Hopefully, we have contributed to the growth and vibrancy of our community."

John Dixon of the civil liberties association thinks Deva is being modest.

He sees Deva and Smyth as liberators of the human spirit.

"When you look at the trial record of Little Sister's ... what it was about wasn't just about gay sex, it was about the freedom, the right, to not only imagine your sexuality but to talk about your sexuality with other people."

Little Sister's opened in 1983, its shelves sparsely populated with books. As they struggled to make ends meet, Deva and Smyth often slept in a room not far from the counter. With them was the store cat, Little Sister.

"Looking back, they were very good times," Deva says. "The secret is to enjoy part of the journey you are on without being overwhelmed by the stress."

In December of 1987, the store's calm was shattered. Someone tossed a bomb into the teal-painted staircase, splintering the stairs and shredding the quilt of community-events posters that lined the walls.

A year later, it happened again.

The bomber was never caught.

In 1992, the restaurant downstairs, which Deva co-owned, was also bombed.

But it wasn't the violence that brought the store national attention. The store emerged from the obscurity of a downtown Vancouver back street to national prominence in 1985 when Customs officers began seizing books.

Little Sister's legal battles began then. They continued until January 2007, when the Supreme Court of Canada denied the store's latest appeal.

Now Deva says: "We're just winding down the last case and sort of saying: `We give in.'

"It was an interesting journey. It was also difficult to run a business at the time we were trying to mount this huge court case."

Gayness linked to brain -we are born gay

Study finds similarities in MRI scans of gay men and straight women; lesbians and straight men
June, 2008

A new Swedish study showing important similarities between the brains of homosexual men and straight women provides important new proof that people are born gay, a top Canadian researcher says.

The neural imaging study, which also showed key similarities between the brains of lesbians and heterosexual men, might further help gays to make a political and sociological case for such things as equal marriage rights and greater legal and religious tolerance, experts say.

"There are now about three or four studies on gays that point to a different organization in the brain," says McMaster University neuroscientist Sandra Witelson.

"And what I think this means ... is that these are differences that can't be explained by any environmental or learning factors," says Witelson, who herself has done groundbreaking work on brain differences between gays and straights.

Dr. Ivanka Savic of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute was the paper's lead author. It was published online yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study itself found key differences in the size and functioning in the left and right hemispheres of homosexuals' brains, compared with those of their heterosexual counterparts.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) the researchers scanned the brains of 20 heterosexual men and an equal number of straight women. They then compared them with scans of 25 gay men and 25 lesbians.

Where the right hemispheres of straight men were typically larger than their left, gay men, like heterosexual woman, had about the same volumes on either side of their brains.

Likewise, the right hemispheres of the lesbian subjects were significantly larger than their left, similar to the size distribution in straight men.

More interestingly, Witelson says, the Swedish study used sensitive positron emission tomography (PET) scans to map significant differences between the functioning of homosexual and heterosexual brains.

"It's one of the first studies that have started to look at functional localization in (live people)," says Witelson, a researcher at McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.

The study looked specifically at a segment of the middle brain known as the amygdala, which is responsible for such things as emotional behaviour, fear responses and aggression.

The regions of amygdala typically active in men and lesbians may be responsible for similarities between these groups in so-called `fight or flight' reactions, the study's authors speculate. Importantly, however, neither hemisphere size not amygdala functioning is likely to come as a result of any learned or environmental factors, the paper argues.

The authors could not say what causes the observed brain differences, but Witelson says they are almost surely present at birth.

"So in fact there's a (genetic) predisposition," she says. That, Witelson argues, should erode the moral judgments often made against homosexual preferences and rebut any argument that it is a mere a lifestyle choice.