No one can say for sure what sank the Titanic of BC broadcasting, the Dynamic Duo of Rafe Mair and Kari Simpson; but we can observe some of the events that ran the ship aground.
Remember that Kari’s appearances on Rafe Mair’s radio talk show were only a small part of her work in the 1990s; the vast majority of her time was spent running the Citizens’ Research Institute, defending families before provincial bureaucrats, and speaking at public rallies.
Some of those rallies got so rambunctious, the managers of the venues where Kari spoke required her to hire police. It wasn’t that Kari riled up or incited the crowds; but the International Socialists—who had made death threats against Kari and her family—were always a danger to the public peace. So Kari complied, and hired off-duty cops to keep the peace.
One of the families Kari defended had expressed concern that their son’s Kindergarten and Grade One teacher, one James Chamberlain, was violating the provincial Education Ministry’s requirement that parents were to be advised if sensitive matters, such as sexual orientation, were to be discussed in the classroom. These particular parents felt that sexual orientation was no appropriate for Kindergarten and Grade One students. Furthermore, they were Christians who objected to the fact that Chamberlain required students to, in his words, “leave their religious beliefs at the classroom door.”
Chamberlain was an outspoken homosexual activist, and he brought his ideas into the classroom, to present them to his 5- and 6-year-old pupils. Kari agreed with the parents who wanted to pull their son out of range of his indoctrination.
Chamberlain was also the teacher at the centre of a high-profile cause celebre called the “Surrey Books Case”, in which he introduced three books into his classroom—books that extolled homosexual households as “normal”.
Let me digress here to add a word of personal witness: in 2009, I attended a “conference” to teach teachers how to make their classrooms more ‘gay’-friendly. James Chamberlain was one of the teachers’ instructors. In the session I participated in, Chamberlain explained to the teachers his theory of how the word “faggot” came to be applied to homosexual men. It’s a wild fantasy!
In the Middle Ages, said Chamberlain, when witches were being burned at the stake, the bodies of homosexual men were used as kindling to start the fire.
If you consult the proprietor of a crematorium, you’ll learn that the human body, which is more than 70% water, is very, very hard to burn; crematoria have to use natural gas or oil to generate a temperature of about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
In short: you cannot use corpses as kindling to start a fire; but in James Chamberlain’s fantasy world, that illusion has become a “fact” he can teach. You have to wonder what he teachers Grade One and Kindergarten students, once he has them under his autonomous control?!?
An important distinction has to be made here: Kari Simpson was never involved in the “Surrey Books” Case; but she did help parents defend their decision to take their son out of Chamberlain’s class. However, Rafe Mair, in several broadcasts, accused Kari of not only being involved in the book case, but insisted that her motivation for helping the parents withdraw their son was—not that the teachers was violating the parents rights; but that the teacher was gay.
That’s ironic, because Kari is on record as saying that the books should be allowed in schools, as long as parents’ right to be informed was respected. But Rafe continued to confuse the issues, and—astonishingly—later on the courts would compound the error by citing as “fact” the very accusation that was at issue in a defamation lawsuit!
Rafe was wrong; Kari wrote to him and to the radio station to inform them that he was wrong. But Rafe’s tirades continued—and they worsened. Eventually, he was comparing Kari to skin-heads, to the Ku Klux Klan, to Nazis—even to Adolf Hitler!
His campaign of hate went on for two years, comprising more than 40 editorials. By re-using material to get maximum mileage out of his writing, Rafe broadcast them, ran them in print, and posted them on various Internet blogs.
Finally, to stop the stream of hatred and defamation, Kari sued.
And just wait until you hear how Canada’s so-called “justice” system handled that case! But we’ll get into that next week.