The bill hasn’t seen as much press coverage as you might expect, but it has spawned some headlines I hope never to see again. The BBC wins the prize for most alarming, with “Should homosexuals be executed?” as if the prospect was merely thought-provoking and ripe for discussion.

The headline, from a post on the BBC website, actually turns out to be part of a show broadcast on the BBC World Service called Have Your Say. The episode—which aired on Wednesday and is still available online)—makes for powerful listening. A woman calls in from Zambia to say she can’t understand how a female can look at another female in a sexual way. When the host presses her on whether she would actually support the death penalty for doing so, she says, “Being executed for being something sinful, it’s okay.” From her tone of voice as she utters those final two words you could easily imagine she was talking about a vegetable she doesn’t like, but that she’d be willing to eat if it ended up on her plate.

The debate over this bill should be a warning to every casual homophobe the world over: this is where revulsion for your fellow man leads you. This is what happens when communities let their intolerance go unchecked, when governments refuse to step in to defend the rights of minorities. And let’s be clear: this bill would government-stamp the elimination of a group of people based on a particular attribute. We have a word for that: it’s genocide.

The bill’s sponsors get around the word by claiming that homosexuality is chosen rather than innate, that it is something you do rather than something you are. But I think it’s telling that the caller above says “for being something sinful.” I think that’s more than a slip of the tongue. Homophobes often claim that homosexuality is something you can “recruit” another person into, or that it’s something you can choose to indulge or ignore, but I think a lot of that genuine revulsion towards queer people has its roots in the opposite belief.

The death penalty is something you advocate for a person whom you believe cannot be saved. The kind of hatred that inspires a person to call a radio show and say, “Gay people don’t deserve to live” does not come from the mere belief that a single act of same-sex intimacy is immoral. It comes from a belief that committing that act transforms you into something irredeemably other and unfit for society.

The ex-gay ministries whose efforts in Uganda gave rise to this bill have denounced it because they believe that gay people can be saved. But the bill is only the ministries’ basic premise taken to its logical conclusion. If you preach that being gay is grievously sinful, but you fail to convince your listeners that rehabilitation is effective, or if those “rehabilitation” attempts fail, it’s not hard to see how we end up here. Several people who call into the show to support the bill justify their position by claiming that that being gay is not a necessary attribute. The ex-gay movement needs to take their share of the responsibility for that.

I try not to get too involved in the question of whether queerness is innate, because in asking it we generally assume that being gay is abnormal. But it clearly matters in this case. A reaction as extreme as the death penalty speaks to a belief on the part of its advocates that gay people are fundamentally unlike them, that they are a species apart. That is what makes it genocide. And all we can hope for at this point is that, when the bill is debated in the Ugandan parliament tomorrow, the members recognize it as such.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web and reviews editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

“Somehow, way [in the] back of our first closet, we’ve built another one, and into it, we have shoved our gay deaf, our gay blind and our gay wheelchair cases.”

More than two decades later, the above is still very much the case. It puts LGBT people with disabilities in a painful and vitriolic catch-22:  They are rejected by an often vain LGBT community because of their disability, and rejected again by a judgmental disability community because of their sexual orientation.

John Killacky, a paraplegic, and Bob Guter, an amputee, know this position all too well.  As the two co-editors of Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories, they were no doubt inundated with painful stories of stigmatization. “Gay men with disabilities don’t fit the queer image of beauty.  In places where gay men congregate for erotic connection — like bars — we quickly get the impression that we’re not welcome,” Guter told The Washington Blade in 2004.

When Killacky was out with his able-bodied partner at the time, he told The Blade it was as if he wasn’t even there. “People leaned over my wheelchair and asked Larry,’How is he feeling?'” Apparently, the girls don’t have it any easier. “They think, ‘I can’t be together with a disabled woman because I’ll have to take care of her,'” Susan McDaniel Stanley, a lesbian with spinal cerebellum degeneration, told The Blade. Corbett O’Toole, a wheelchair user who runs Disabledwomen.net, told them it comes down to this: “The lesbian image is of a woman who can work and support her lover. If you’re disabled, it’s hard to be seen as sexual no matter how ‘out’ you are. If I’m in a bookstore, lesbians think I just need help getting a book off the shelf. They wouldn’t ask me out for coffee.”

One man from Long Beach California was so desperate to vent, he posted the following on the Long Beach Equality message board:

“I decided to finally come out of my shell after two years, be active in the community and socialize. What I have found is the moment I’m asked what I do for a living and I tell them I’m disabled, the conversation stops as if I have the plague…This has been coming from people who are so mad that they are being treated as a second-class citizens for not being allowed to marry, yet they treat people in just the manner they are screaming about.”

The disabled community and those who support it are just as dismissive to their LGBT brothers and sisters.  In her groundbreaking article in Abilities Magazine, “Nothing to Hide: Gay People with Disabilities Come Out of the Closet”, Anna Quon interviews a man who often rode the Handibus with drivers who refused to wheel him into gay bars to meet his partner in the 80s and early 90s. The homophobia among the disabled population continues.  In rehab, Killacky noticed that all the sexual health information was for heterosexuals and when he went to a conference for artists with disabilities there were no openly gay disabled people there and the  paraplegic comedienne made homophobic jokes.  Some people have gone as far as suggesting that the queer individual is just “confused” and what they believe to be their sexual orientation is really just a byproduct of the disability itself.  Gay disabled comedian Greg Walloch mocks this sentiment in hilarious fashion during his one man show F**k the Disabled!

However, the worst affront to the disabled LGBT community comes in the distinct lack of resources and support groups behind it, especially in North America.  The UK has done a much better job supporting the disabled LGBT community through Disability Now, their national disability magazine, and the columns dealing with the issue within. They also have one thing no country in North America has — a national organization for the disabled LGBT community known as Regard. Of course, that shouldn’t surprise anyone who regularly reads this blog. I’ve frequently mentioned how much better mobilized and aggressive UK disability activism is. The BBC supports LGBT awareness in the community with the Ouch! website and podcast, while the CBC’s Disability Matters column ground to a halt in 2006 due to budget cuts.

Speaking of Canada, typing “Gay and Disabled in Canada” in Google yields Quon’s article as its most high-profile result. No Canadian organizations, no Canadian groups and no Canadian websites, and while Quon’s article broke down the door, it is now well out of  date. Perhaps Canada’s last hope in dealing with LGBT issues specific to disability lies in Toronto’s famously progressive cooperative sex shop Come As You Are and its disability-friendly books, toys and workshops.

Those deaf and blind LGBT people Hannon mentions at the top of this entry did get their support groups in the form of BFLAG (the blind community’s answer to PFLAG) and RAD (The Rainbow Alliance for the Deaf). RAD is still around, but BFLAG is no longer in operation. To me though, it hardly matters because blindness and deafness often barely affect your looks, at least not in the jarring way a wheelchair can frequently diminish your prospects. Many hearing impaired and blind individuals admit they can “pass” for able-bodied in a dating environment.  To me, if any disabilities  deserve LGBT support, it’s those ones that are most noticeable. Yet, people with mobility disabilities have nothing recognizing their LGBT population. C’mon, even queer stutterers have their own LGBT organization before people with mobility disabilities. Guter and Killacky tried with their Bent Voices magazine, but even that ran out of steam. (The archives can be found here.)

Despite this lack of support or acknowledgement, gay people with disabilities still have to navigate these chilly social waters on their own, often forced to believe in their own potential as lovers when no one else will. When Guter fell in love with his college roommate, he found this out the hard way:

“He asked me, ‘Do you ever think you’ll find a man who will sleep with you?'” For Guter, that was the challenge that, he told The Blade, “mysteriously engendered hope.”  He responded, “Yes, if I find the right man.”

Washington-based TV anchors Marash and Fakry of the Al Jazeera English language network. Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters.

In late 1996, in a tiny peninsular emirate on the Persian Gulf with a total surface area barely larger than Toronto and Montreal combined, an experiment began. At the invitation of Qatar’s head of state, a small group of former BBC Arabic journalists relocated to the capital, Doha. They had been left jobless when their London-based employer’s Arabic station folded (due to an editorial scuffle with its Saudi funders), and they needed work. This group of journalists became the nucleus and precursor of what was to become the most ambitious and costliest single broadcast project in history—the Al Jazeera television network.

When it first began, few outside the Arab world noticed the daring and confrontational newcomer to the regional satellite scene. The station drew the attention of viewers because of its explicit and overt criticism of power in the region and its tackling of taboo issues—from government corruption and lack of democratic institutions to women’s rights and homosexuality. Al Jazeera carved a niche for itself and gathered a loyal following for its incisive coverage, volatile debate shows, and extensive investigative reporting.

Now, more than a decade since Al Jazeera’s inception, Canada can no longer afford to shun the world’s first truly global news network—especially one that is both steered and shaped by Canada’s best and brightest.

Undoubtedly, Al Jazeera has generated plenty of debate and controversy. Glorified and vilified in equal measure, it has been described as “radical” and “extremist” by its detractors and as a much-needed “alternative” medium by its admirers. But regardless of leaning and intent, most commentators acknowledge that Al Jazeera represents an important phenomenon in the Arab media.

In North America, Al Jazeera is a household name in part due to its unfettered, and sometimes exclusive, access to key news events, including the early days of the U.S.led wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, as well as its status as the destination of choice for videos from Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman El-Zawahiri.

More recently, Al Jazeera was the only global network on the ground in Gaza during the Israeli military attack on the strip between December 2008 and January 2009. It was during these periods that the station solidified its reputation as the go-to source of “alternative” news for the Western media organizations.

Yet, as Al Jazeera’s English-language station (AJE) makes significant strides internationally, beaming into more than 140 million households in at least 100 countries, it remains under blackout in North America.The network’s inability to secure cable providers in the U.S., and the highly politicized battles to undermine its effort for access across the continent, have left it embattled but not defeated. Instead, AJE built its headquarters for the Western hemisphere in Washington, D.C., and expanded its online video capability to reach American and Canadian audiences.

Al Jazeera has come close to broadcasting to Canadian homes before. In 2004, the CRTC reviewed the Arabic network for inclusion on Canadian cable service providers. The process unleashed a firestorm, with critics accusing it of anti-Semitism and hate speech. The station never went to air in Canada.

Two years later, AJE faced the same fate in the U.S. cable market—with the exception of two small providers in Toledo, Ohio, and Burlington, Vt. Burlington became the site of high-profile town-hall debates after the network withdrew from the deal due to viewer complaints, many of which accused Al Jazeera of being “anti-American.” But the city council eventually reinstated the network, saying it offered a unique “alternative” to American programming. It was considered a major victory for the network’s U.S. profile.

Of course, four years make all the difference. While the early battle to include Al Jazeera in the cable offerings pertained to the Arabic language station, which presumably appealed only to the Arabic speakers in Canada, today’s application by AJE targets the entire viewing audience of Canada. While the usual critics of the station are levelling the same accusations this time around, defenders argue AJE is a whole new network.

Of note is AJE’s list of employees, which reads like a who’s-who of international journalism. The station boasts the likes of Sir David Frost, who hosts a regular talk show; Riz Khan, formerly of CNN International and the BBC; Rageh Omar, formerly of BBC; and former U.S. Marine captain and public affairs officer Josh Rushing, author of the captivating autobiography Mission Al Jazeera.

The Canadian contribution is also significant. The team boasts veteran Canadian journalists including Avi Lewis, former host and producer of CBC’s CounterSpin; Brendan Connor, the veteran CBC sports journalist; and Kimberly Halkett, formerly of Canada’s Global Television and the network’s chief investigative reporter. The most recent addition is station head Tony Burman, former editor-in-chief of CBC News.

The station is breaking through the blackout—its online video traffic increased by 600 percent during the first two weeks of 2009 (in part due to Al Jazeera’s exclusive access in Gaza), with 60 percent of these hits coming from the United States. In Canada, the CRTC is currently reviewing AJE’s application. Meanwhile, AJE launched its own campaign website, iwantaje.com, and made its coverage available free of charge online.

If approved, the network has committed to opening its first Canadian news bureau to bring Canadian news to a global audience— which would make it the only international news channel with a news bureau in Canada. Given the shrinking budget of the CBC, and Canada’s nearly invisible global media footprint, Al Jazeera English may be a golden opportunity for Canada to reach the world.