What matters is not the context of Lukiwski's words - it's the text

Ottawa Citizen

Eric Savoy, Citizen Special

Published: Thursday, April 10, 2008

Tom Lukiwski must have had a very, very bad day last week when the Saskatchewan NDP released a videotape on which he spouts poisonous disgust for "homosexual faggots with dirt under their fingernails that transmit diseases." In the wake of Mr. Lukiwski's apology and the efforts of the Harper government to circle the wagons around him, much has been made of the "context" of his inflammatory rhetoric.

The video was shot as a party joke in the PC campaign headquarters of Grant Devine, during his unsuccessful bid for re-election as Saskatchewan's premier, way back in 1991. It is a "private" document, not a public one, we are told, and besides, things were different then.

Yet such explanation does not achieve what the Tories really want, which is to explain Mr. Lukiwski's hateful speech away, to reduce it to insignificance. Better, they say, to forgive and forget. Case closed.

Not so fast. There are important lessons to be learned from this unsavoury incident -- not just about homophobia, but about hate speech in general. For one thing, hate speech seems inevitably to move toward metaphors of dirt and disease, metaphors of infection and contamination. To many readers, Mr. Lukiwski's words were uncannily reminiscent of those offered by aboriginal leader David Ahenakew, who said of European Jews in Hitler's Germany, "how do you get rid of ... you know, a disease like that that's gonna take over?"

Although the histories of homophobia and anti-Semitism are very different, they converge -- and not for the first time -- in this all-too-predictable metaphor. By the terms of this inflammatory rhetoric, Jews and homosexuals are essentially interchangeable. Just fill in the blank: X is a disease, and disease transmits disease, and it endangers us all, and it must be eliminated. To write such a sentence is to realize how easily one thing -- a single word -- leads to other things. Words, then, do not simply lead to violence: they are a form of violence.

This context -- the metaphors that hate speech gravitates toward -- is, I suggest, precisely the scale in which Mr. Lukiwski's words, the harm they do, and the violence they incite, should be weighed. From this point of view, it doesn't matter that they were spoken in an unofficial context, or that they were recorded 17 years ago. If this speech act came back to haunt Tom Lukiwski on that very, very bad day, it has also returned to do its toxic work in the present, and in a very public forum. In other words, what ought matter to us is not the context of Mr. Lukiwski's words -- it's the text.

Another, perhaps more sobering, lesson to be drawn from recent nastiness has to do with what I would call comparative bias. No doubt the Tory strategizers were thinking, thank God that Mr. Lukiwski didn't target women, Jews, aboriginals, immigrants, or people of colour, because that would really be indefensible. No amount of "contextualizing" could get rid of that. This is a frank speculation, but given the realities of Canadian federal politics, it has a certain legitimacy.