Queer Granddad

Laurie Baird and members of the Action4Canada Kelowna chapter doing a prayer march around the School District 23 offices on April 7, 2023 Open letter to Laurie Baird who is the Kelowna chapter leader for Action4Canada , a Canada-wide organization that pedals in fearmongering and stoking hate against the 2SLGBTQ community. Dear Ms. Baird, The transphobic assault where a man belligerently demanded proof of gender for youth participating at the recent school sports event in Kelowna shocked and disgusted thousands of people around the world. This is on you, Laurie Baird. It is on you and the people like you who crusade as the moral gender police wreaking havoc on the lives of children who want nothing more than what every child wants. To be loved and supported, and to participate fully in life, school, and sports. You masquerade as someone who is out to “protect the children”, when in fact what you’re doing is causing extreme anxiety and stress to gender-diverse and trans children and the...

TW: CSA/Sexual Abuse A worldwide non-denominational church group has just disclosed by way of a letter from the head minister, Doyle Smith in Oregon, that one of their senior ministers, Dean Bruer was found to have raped multiple women and children. Bruer was found deceased in a Government Camp, Oregon hotel room in June 2022, at which time he was the overseeing minister for Oregon. While it isn’t odd that someone died in a hotel room, it is highly unusual for one of this group’s homeless ministers to be staying alone in a hotel when one of the bases of their belief system is that ministers are to stay in the homes of members. Bruer was 67 years old and had been in the ministry for 46 years. What is shocking about this case is what was disclosed in the letter. Evidence was found on the phone, laptop, and in the records of this minister of his crimes, yet the ministry failed to notify authorities or alert members until this letter was written nine months after the body was discovered, a...

Looking through social media posts about the planned Drag show protest in Kelowna today I noticed quite a few people were unaware of why protesters are calling Drag performers and transgender people groomers and pedophiles. I decided to write a blog post to give some background. I attended the event to show solidarity with the queer community and see first-hand what all the fuss was about. I was expecting the police would need to be called. A poster inviting people to join the protest showed up on a social media page under the name of Graeme Flannigan with the title "URGENT: Protest All Ages Drag Show for Children." Nowhere was it billed as being an event for children.  The battle cry of this group is that these types of performances sexualize children. It is some of the same people and the same storyline used by those who organized to support Parents Voice BC school trustee candidates as they sought to end SOGI 123 in schools, a set of resources to help create safe and inclu...

Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson (r) and Jenn Smith at the anti-SOGI protest in Victoria, BC which they organized on September 29, 2018, where dozens of counter-protesters also gathered. Photo - Black Press Media To quote Laura Lynn Tyler Thompson who names herself as CEO of Laura Lynn Tyler Thompson Ministries "Disagreement with an ideology is not hate." Thompson has been in the cross-hairs of furious parents of LGBTQ kids, their allies, and many groups related to K-12 education across British Columbia because of her crusade to have SOGI 123, which she calls an ideology, removed from schools. Some of Thompson's critics have labeled her social media posts as hate speech. SOGI 123 is a set of resources for teachers to help create safe schools for all students regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. This was implemented two years ago by BC's Ministry of Education and has been adopted by all 60 school districts across the province. Thompson has also bee...

Photo by  Peter Hershey  on  Unsplash I'm on the phone with a very dear friend.  They are struggling with one very fundamental life question.  "Am I fulfilling my life purpose?"  This person is despondent and talking about giving up on life, thinking they had wasted so much of their life and it seemed to them futile to carry on.  My heart is aching listening to this conversation. How will it be possible to say anything that would make a difference?  What coaching would be possible?  What popped into my mind was something Dr. Wayne Dyer said.  "Look at every person as the unfolding of God."   This question burned to be asked, "When did you decide to give up on yourself?"  The answer "When I was seventeen I made a very stupid decision and since then I have wasted so much time.  Now I'm in my fifties.  What a waste." I responded with "You did something when you were seventeen that was the right thing for you...

It started with orange seeds.  I could feel them hitting the back of my neck and head, some of them going inside my shirt collar and sticking to my back.  I shrunk down in my seat, working very hard at pretending it didn't bother me, trying to be invisible.  Any attention would only have all the kids on the school bus laughing and staring at me.  The seeds were being spit at me by the girl in the seat behind me.  I could hear her snickering with the kid beside her.  When I ignored her she leaned forward and whispered "Retard, retard, you're such a retard you should be dead."  "Retard" was the worst word to use on someone back in 1967.  Then she started kicking the back of my seat.  I was frozen in my seat, afraid to fight back, afraid to say anything.  It was drummed into me, I was a wimp, a sissy, a freak.  It was said to me so many times by the kids on the bus, the kids at school.  I was a discard, an outcast, a boy who no on...

I bobbed up and down on the yellow vinyl seat as the 820 John Deere tractor labored across the summer fallow field pulling the cultivator with field harrows dragging behind.  The musty smell of freshly turned earth combined with crushed weeds filled the air.  Gulls squawked as they followed along overhead watching for mice.  Going up the next hill the tractor began to lose power and even as I shifted the gears down I had to push the hydraulic lever up to raise the cultivator shovels, easing the load on the tractor to be able to make it up the hill.  The loss of power was a slipping clutch.  It was a hot July day in 1971.  I was fourteen years old - a skinny farm kid with nerdy glasses.  Always curious about how things worked I often watched as Dad fixed the machinery on the family farm.  I remembered him describing a time before when the clutch was slipping on the tractor and he did what he called "setting the clutch" to fix it....