‘Lack of understanding’

A New Brunswick village’s controversial straight-pride flag shows that we must sometimes go beyond treating everyone the same, the chair of the province’s human rights commission says.

The village of Chipman took down the straight-pride flag last week after a single day. Comments had poured in on the village’s Facebook page and elsewhere, criticizing the flag as harmful towards the LGBTQ community.

The man behind the straightpride flag, retired welder Glenn Bishop, insisted he is not the least bit anti-gay and is simply proud to be straight.

But rights commission chair Nathalie Chiasson said people need to understand the impact of indirect discrimination — when there is an adverse effect on someone even when the original intent may not have been to discriminate.

In a statement on the controversy, she noted heterosexual white men are rarely discriminated against. “The raising of a flag apparently in support of all groups in a New Brunswick community had the opposite negative effect,’’ she said.

“What stands out with this flag story is the lack of understanding of the effect of such an action on an already marginalized group of New Brunswick citizens.’’

The village had flown the rainbow LGBTQ flag this summer, and Bishop said he had no objections to it. But he wanted to show his own straight pride — he conceived the flag and it was made by a friend, and they went through “the proper procedures’’ to get it raised by the village.

He said one intention was to signal that the whole village wasn’t gay, and to represent “95 per cent of the population.’’

Chipman Mayor Carson Atkinson had helped raise the flag, which shows the symbols for female and male on a field of black and white stripes.