UGANDA NORTH:

Gay rights dominate Nunavut campaign (Jill Mahoney,
The Globe and Mail, 05/03/04)

The vote to select Nunavut's premier today is expected to boil down to an issue that has long been decided in Southern Canada: granting equality rights to gays and lesbians.

In the country's newest territory, observers predict the bitterly fought race will be tight. [...]

In an effort to bring Nunavut in line with the secular Canadian mainstream, Mr. Okalik, an Ottawa-trained lawyer, shepherded through the territory's new Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against homosexuals.

When the law was passed in November, Mr. Curley, a veteran Inuit leader and evangelical Christian, was so incensed that he decided to re-enter politics to work against it.

"We're giving a special category, apparently, of certain rights that are not defined, that are very ... discrete. You don't know what it means," he told the Nunatsiaq News earlier this year.

"But if you believe in your Creator, in your God, what does he say about those things? Is that acceptable to God?"

In recent years, a burgeoning evangelical Christian movement has swept through Nunavut. In the process, said Jim Bell, editor-in-chief of the Nunatsiaq News and a veteran observer of the Eastern Arctic, it has become closely intertwined with the traditional Inuit way of life.

For thirty years, the Inuit relied heavily on the guidance of southern political and social advisors who were well-versed in modern secular ways and the sixties-style rhetoric of self-determination. Alcoholism, suicide, child and spousal abuse and just about every other pathology you can name soared despite an endless stream of cash and benefits from Ottawa. When the Inuit were given their own territorial government in 1999, national elites from coast to coast celebrated this high-water mark of enlightened progress and tolerance. Heh, heh.