Celebrating Gay Rights: From Canada to Iran

Not only a celebration, Pride Week is a time to reflect on what can be done to help other countries toward a recognition of gay rights.

Pride Week is one of Canada's premier arts and cultural festivals. Internationally, however, this weeklong festival rates not only as one of the largest Pride celebrations in the world, but also one of the largest street festivals.

Bringing together individuals, community groups, businesses, sponsors, and families, this festival stands as the celebration of community, as much as the celebration of a particular community group. Despite such a wide audience, these individuals choose each year to come together in a celebration of Toronto, in a celebration of culture, and in a celebration of identity and equality.

While the event itself is always exceptional – thanks to the enormous support, organization, and planning of hundreds of volunteers – it also stands as a reminder of the ongoing struggles against discrimination and persecution that is endured daily by people on the basis of their sexual orientation.

The world must recognize that fundamental human rights cannot be selected based on preference or convenience, they are fundamental, and are consequently inalienable and intrinsic to each and every human life. In such a world, gay rights are human rights and the importance of protecting all human rights is recognized unequivocally.

In countries like Iran, where being convicted of homosexuality can result in capital punishment, intolerance and human rights abuses are rampant. To discredit one human right is to subvert the power of all human rights and no country exists where sexual orientation is criminalized that doesn't also have an abundance of human rights abuse.

The organization, spirit, and self-sacrifice of those individuals within Iran who resist this sexual oppression are indeed heroic. Yet, there is a role, and a responsibility, for the international community to work externally to exert pressure that will finally bring about the recognition everywhere of the fundamental right to freedom from discrimination on the basis of sexual identity.

Such international leadership, while not yet having manifested at the state level (it is an unfortunate reality that few governments have ever considered advocating orientation rights on the international stage), has been shown at the level of the individual.

Leading this year's Toronto Pride parade as International Grand Marshal is Victor Juliet Mukasa. Chairperson of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), Victor is a human rights defender for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender liberation in her home country of Uganda as well as being recognized across Africa.

Such advocacy is not merely the dissemination of opinion, but the rewiring of archaic, harmful, and widely unchallenged prejudices regarding sexual identity. It is a new generation of thinking and it is individuals like Victor who have sacrificed much to share this tolerance with the world. Only in this way can a world exist in which people are no longer punished for simply being who they are.

This week is the 29th Toronto Pride Week, and I welcome all those interested in attending to come and join the festivities. Let us celebrate tolerance, acceptance, and human rights together.