Hollywood Double Standards: Are Lesbian Films More Acceptable Than Gay Male Movies?
Lesbian filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko’s new film “The Kids Are All Right” has received overwhelming praise from the mainstream North American press.
Mainstream heterosexual Hollywood movie stars Annette Benning and Julianne Moore star as the lesbian couple. However, there is a subversive vein of homophobia and sexism to this movie.
For example, lesbian relationships are acceptable as long as the lesbian couple conforms to heterosexist beauty standards.
North Americans don’t mind watching movies with pretty, slim, white lesbians kissing or having hot sex on the silver screen.
“The Kids Are All Right” doesn’t seem like a movie that is geared towards the gay and lesbian community. This movie is just like a boring TV movie of the week
that should be on the Lifetime channel. “The Kids Are All Right” presents homosexuality that is supposed to “normalizes” our sexual orientation for the rich white
suburban crowd.
It is obvious that Lisa Cholodenko made this movie to attract heterosexual men and this movie is a straight male fantasy.
Annette Benning and Julianne Moore are gorgeous, talented, actresses, and feminine lesbianism is basically now mainstream.
By contrast, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor’s gay male romantic comedy “I Love You Phillip Morris” is still having trouble obtaining distribution in North America.
“I Love You Phillip Morris” has already been released in Europe but in North America the release date has been pushed back to October 2010.
The negative press “I Love You Phillip Morris” has received in America is not just abhorrent but also not surprising.
Today, mainstream media outlets such as New York Magazine have posted clips of Jim Carrey engaged in an explicit gay sex scene with another man.
So what is the difference? It is clear that North Americans are fearful of gay male homosexuality, it is a threat to the masculinity of the Hollywood powerbrokers and the people in power in Hollywood.
McGregor and Carrey’s film is a refreshing change to the image Hollywood wants to present about male homosexuality. In the film “I Love You Phillip Morris”, Jim Carey’s character has no conflict about his homosexuality.
The love scenes between McGregor and Carrey are tender and the actors illustrate that gay male love exists. Perhaps the problem is the marketing of “I Love You Phillip Morris”?
Straight people love films such as the pedestrian “Brokeback Mountain” or “Milk” both movies are so repulsive and stereotypical it makes me want to vomit!
“I Love You Phillip Morris” shatters the stereotype that all gay men we have this anguish, angst, and agony about being gay.
The gay sex scenes in “I Love You Phillip Morris” are important because gay men we do have sex. I guess the idea of Carrey and McGregor kissing upsets the
Hollywood powerbrokers.
The fear of North Americans is, the discourse exists that male homosexuality is abhorrent, frightening, and deleterious. “I Love You Phillip Morris” has some groundbreaking scenes of explicit gay male sex scenes.
Hollywood doesn’t want to present gay male relationships as loving, sexually charged, or real.
There are still anxieties about male homosexuality that disrupts the beliefs of heterosexuals.
“I Love You Phillip Morris” was created for an adult audience, so why is there still this fear of gay male love?
The double standards of the mainstream North American press is not only homophobic but also disappointing and annoying.
Meanwhile, “The Kids Are All Right” is about a white, lesbian, upper middle class, suburban family. The movie is derivative and lacking in details. Now I know I will be in a minority for saying this, I just wish there was more diversity in relation to gay and lesbian films.
I am so tired of these movies about white, upper class, gays and lesbians getting all the media attention.
Where are the films about Latina lesbians, Asian lesbians or black lesbians or Aboriginal lesbians on the silver screen?
I yearn for the day when a Holywood superstars of colour such as Samuel L Jackson, Shemar Moore, Will Smith, Jimmy Smits, Halle Berry, Lucy Liu, Angela Bassett, or Jennifer Lopez can headline gay movies.
The dilemma is, homosexuality is still taboo in communities of colour.
Benjamin and Peter Bratt did release their wonderful film “La Mission” a few months ago. “La Mission” is an independent film that challenged the homopbobia,
in Latino American communities.
The Bratt Brothers said they had problems finding financing for “La Mission” because Hollywood believed Americans are not interested in a movie about gay men of colour.
On the internet, some Latinos are upset that the issue of male homosexuality was explored in the film. However, La Mission has grossed over $1 million dollars
proving there is an audience for movies about male homosexuality in communities of colour.
Another quandary is, homosexuality is still viewed by the mainstream as a symbol of whiteness. The ideology is, gay people are white and gays of colour we don’t exist.
I think gays and lesbians of colour we really need to become more organized, mobilized, and create our own movies.
Another problem I have with “The Kids Are All Right” is, why is Mark Ruffalo in the movie? I understand, the teen children of Annette Benning and Julianne Moore search for their sperm donor father.
I am just disgusted that Julianne Moore’s character Jules has an affair with Mark Ruffalo! Does this make sense? A real lesbian would never have sex with a man!
This movie is presenting the homophobic message that some lesbians are sexually attracted to men. Any woman that seeks out men for sex is not a real lesbian
because real lesbians are not interested in having sex with men.
I believe is very irresponsible of Lisa Cholodenko to present this belief that lesbians actually want to have sex with men.
Why didn’t Lisa Cholodenko have a female love interest for Jules if she was going to have an affair?
It is clear to me that Cholodenko was interested in trying to reach a heterosexual, middle class, audience.
Mark Ruffalo’s character was created to make straight people feel safe and comfortable with their own prejudices about lesbian relationships.
There is a homophobic belief that lesbian relationships are not real and two women cannot sexually satisfy each other.
“The Kids Are All Right” was created for the so-called “open-minded” straight people. You know, the kind of straight people who think they are “hip” and “cool” and totally accepting of gays that don’t upset their heterosexist beliefs and values.
Mark Ruffalo’s character is basically a plot device to placate the prejudices of straight folks. This movie is not groundbreaking it is offensive and clearly anti lesbian!
LA Times Article: Can American Actress Lindsay Lohan Make A Comeback Or Is It Too Late For Her?
By Amy Kaufman
Lindsay Lohan had just been fired again, and she wasn’t taking the news well.
“She was really hurt about it, and I felt terrible,” said David Michaels, who was set to direct her in a movie called The Other Side.
Michaels made the call to his 23-year-old would-be leading lady earlier this spring after investors in the film balked at Lohan’s most recent tabloid misadventures.
“The budget on the film had been increased from $15 (million) to $20 million, and when the producers were going out for that kind of money, they were finding financiers and distributors asking, ‘Is she really going to draw people to a theatre? Is the money going to be covered?’ ” Michaels said in a recent telephone interview. “It certainly had to do with the six-to eight-month period after we signed her, that her image did not get any better …
“Everyone seems to be all about finding what’s wrong with her, and no one seemingly is really reaching out to her and offering her a path to reclaiming what she once had.”
What she once had, of course, was promise. A decade ago, Lohan was considered one of the most talented young actresses of her generation. Her performances in teen comedies such as The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday earned her comparisons to the likes of Jodie Foster. “Her talent was undeniable,” said Mark Waters, who directed Lohan in 2003’s Freaky Friday and 2004’s Mean Girls. “I would set out the most difficult obstacle course for her for a scene, and she’d nail it like a floor routine. She was that good.”
Since her feature film debut at 11, however, Lohan has increasingly been recognized not for her movie performances but for behaviour ranging from drug abuse and eating disorders to failed stints in rehab and, most recently, possible probation violations in relation to a 2007 DUI charge.
Her conduct has pummeled her reputation and her career. Those who finance and make movies, wary of her physical and mental health and skeptical of her ability to show up to work on time, if at all, appear increasingly hesitant to risk their money on such a repeat offender. And although readers may devour tales of her off-screen escapades on celebrity websites and in tabloid magazines, they seem less willing these days to drop $13 for a ticket to one of her movies.
Lohan has not appeared on the big screen since 2007, when her thriller I Know Who Killed Me, in which she had a dual role as a stripper and a torture victim, flopped. Her 2009 comedy Labor Pains failed to get a domestic movie distributor and debuted on the cable channel ABC Family. She has a small part in the upcoming Machete, and after being fired from The Other Side, she was cast as the late porn star Linda Lovelace in a biopic called Inferno, which has not begun filming.
And yet there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a good comeback story. Lohan has the sympathy of filmmakers and business partners (like those she works with on her fashion line, 6126) who say she’d readily be accepted back into the film world, much like former substance abusers Robert Downey Jr. and Mickey Rourke, if she could somehow defeat her demons.
But that would require a sense of purpose and discipline that, if a recent jaunt to the Cannes Film Festival is any indication, may still be absent.
When she flew to Cannes in May, she was supposed to be promoting Inferno, and, according to director Matthew Wilder, Lohan did have meetings with foreign sales executives and others “who, after having met her, put up money” for the film.
Yet the images that emerged from France were more suited to TMZ than the trade papers. One night, there she was stumbling off a yacht; on another, she posed for a photo next to what looked like a mirror plate covered with white powder.
Back in the States, a Beverly Hills judge reprimanded her for going to Cannes and missing a probation hearing related to an August 2007 case, when she pleaded guilty to misdemeanour drug charges and no contest to three driving charges. (Lohan claimed her passport was stolen and said she was unable to get back in time for the court date.) As a result, she was forced to post $100,000 in bail and wear a clumsy ankle bracelet that monitors her alcohol consumption.
Only a couple of weeks later, during a party after the MTV Movie Awards, her bracelet was set off. She’s due back in court on Tuesday, when she may face up to a year in jail if she is found guilty of violating her probation.
As her bail bondsman was delivering an additional $100,000 to the court in early June as a result of the ankle bracelet violation, Lohan took to her Twitter account to deny she’d consumed alcohol.
“This is all because of a FALSE accusation by tabloids& paparazzi& it is … digusting. (sic) I’ve been more than I’m compliance &feeling great”
Through her manager, Lohan declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this story and publicly purports to be -at least via Twitter -healthy and happy.
“i’m doing and feeling great, filming right now and so happy … I really feel lucky,”
she wrote on the social networking site last month.
In a series of interviews with the Los Angeles Times, many who have worked with Lohan say they saw warning signs even during her early teenage years.
Nina Jacobson, who headed Disney at the time of the Freaky Friday release, said the studio immediately saw star potential in the then teenager. “She definitely felt like a star, and she really carried the movie with Jamie Lee (Curtis),” she said. “I think coming out of it, we were absolutely of a mind to do more with her.”
Still, Jacobson wanted to make sure Lohan was ready to handle the scrutiny that came with being a Disney poster child.
“I said, ‘Are you sure you’re prepared to be under the Disney spotlight?'” Jacobson recalled. “And she said she was fine with it. But most people wouldn’t be -it’s just an age when you sow your wild oats. (S)he said she felt confident she could do it and was more than ready to live up to those pressures.”
Only a short time after that discussion, when she began shooting 2004’s Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, there were “rumbles of what was to come,” said the film’s director, Sara Sugarman.
“Lindsay was commanding a lot of money and designer clothes, and people were throwing things at her in the formative years,” Sugarman said. “It’s bad enough that you’re recognized and you don’t know why people are giving you so much attention -let alone throw money and power into that equation. If you don’t have your foundation, I think it’s just hard for people.”
But what really troubled Lohan, Sugarman believes, were her deep-seated insecurities. She didn’t like that she had red hair or freckles, two trademarks of her endearing image.
“She didn’t see herself as a pretty girl. She’d criticize herself. She wouldn’t leave herself alone,” the director said.
Many attribute those self-esteem issues to Lohan’s family life, which was, at that
point, unravelling. Her father, Michael Lohan, an ex-Wall St. trader, had been sent to jail for offences related to driving under the influence of alcohol. And mother Dina Lohan lived in Long Island, N.Y., with her three other children while Lindsay resided on the West Coast during her teenage years.
It was a time when Lohan was painfully lonely, said Greg Wells, a music producer who worked with her on her second album, 2005’s A Little More Personal (Raw), on which she penned an angry song to her father called Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father) about how much his absence in her life had hurt her.
“My studio is on Robertson Blvd., so she’d show up at the studio and have all these paparazzi chasing her,” he said, which at one point resulted in a car accident. “She was 19 years old, her dad was in jail, her mom was on the East Coast, and there was a stalker in the hotel where she lived. I remember her crying on the phone with her mom, saying, ‘I am here all alone, I was just in a terrible car accident.’ My heart really broke.”
In 2007, the bad behaviour ramped up. Lohan was arrested twice on suspicion of DUI, checked into rehab twice, and spent 84 minutes in jail. She also took a huge blow professionally during production of Georgia Rule, when a letter from producer James Robinson castigating her for her “heavy partying” and acting like a “spoiled child” was leaked to the media.
“I remember the day she didn’t come in to work and said she was sick, we had a photograph of her the night before out at 3 in the morning,” recalled Robinson, the chief executive of Morgan Creek Productions.
Director Garry Marshall called the executive to say he had already shot as much footage as he could without Lohan, and the production was quickly losing money.
“He was just like, ‘Jim, I don’t know what to do. I’ve hit a wall,’ ” Robinson said. “The other actresses -Felicity Huffman, Jane Fonda -all tried to Mother Hen her. They did everything they knew how to help that girl get her act together, and she just didn’t listen.”
Months later, in an interview with a magazine, Lohan admitted she was a “bit irresponsible” on set.
In the years that followed, the tabloid-chronicled spiral continued. Today, even some of L.A.’s nightlife moguls, who once welcomed the cachet -and publicity -Lohan could bring to their club, are fearful of her erratic behaviour.
“Lindsay Lohan had many crazy nights at Trousdale,” said Brent Bolthouse, who owns that nightlife establishment. “I’ve been friends with her for a long, long, long time. I hate to see her behaving poorly. I would never go to someone’s house and behave that way.”
Some film industry executives suggest Lohan may be difficult to insure or inordinately expensive to cover on future productions (producers typically buy insurance to protect their investments in case key cast members cannot complete a film), but Inferno director Wilder said he isn’t concerned.
“I think this is a project that’s really important to her, and she’s dedicated to it,” he said. “There’s such a crazy machine built up around her now, and there’s so much noise around her in the press that people forget she’s a really great actor.”
Lohan does seem to have a solid team managing her career. Though she has jumped around to various agencies, including Creative Artists Agency and Endeavor in recent years, she is currently represented by Nick Styne at CAA and is managed by Untitled Entertainment. During the last few months she has had no official publicist, though she is still in contact with her longtime press agent, Leslie Sloane, copresident of Baker Winokur Ryder PR.
Meanwhile, Lohan has also been busy pursuing her fashion career. Her leggings brand, 6126, will expand into a full clothing line with 280 pieces being released this month. The collection will hit the racks after a highly publicized gig for Lohan as the artistic adviser at Ungaro last fall failed when Women’s Wear Daily labelled her line, which featured glittering, heart-shaped nipple pasties, “cheesy and dated.”
“(W)e’ve not had a problem with our retailers questioning any sort of negative press,” said Kristi Kaylor, president of 6126, which is named for Marilyn Monroe’s birth date. “It’s really frustrating for me, because I do see such a different side of her. She just recently flew to New York and met with our Bloomingdale’s and Saks (Fifth Avenue) buyers to sit down and let them know how serious she was. Anything she does, she wants it to be 150 per cent.”
Another potential upcoming film vehicle could be The Dry Gulch Kid, an adventure comedy that would co-star Willie Nelson and be produced by his company. Kerry Wallum, a producer on the movie, said he had become interested in casting the actress after hearing about her work on the Robert Rodriguezproduced Machete, out in September.
“I think Willie has seen it all. Everybody makes mistakes, and some people make them over and over. She’s a good actress,” Wallum said, adding that Lohan is not yet officially attached to the film. “Maybe this is the deal that will straighten her up completely. And even if it ain’t, we’ll be out in the country. I guarantee she’ll be to set on time. She’ll be stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”
Time Magazine Article: Joel Stein My Own Private India Column Offends The South Asian American Community.
I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. (See pictures of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park.)
I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn’t want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?
I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them.
After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.
Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians “dot heads.” One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to “go home to India.” In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if “dot heads” was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose. (See TIME’s special report “The Making of America: Thomas Edison.”)
Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn’t card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.
To figure out why it bothered me so much, I talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term as mayor of Edison. Choi said that part of what I don’t like about the new Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom, fittingly for a town called Edison, are inventors and engineers. And no place is immune to change. In the 11 years I lived in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, that area transformed from a place with gangs and hookers to a place with gays and transvestite hookers to a place with artists and no hookers to a place with rich families and, I’m guessing, mistresses who live a lot like hookers. As Choi pointed out, I was a participant in at least one of those changes. We left it at that.
Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn’t fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison’s first Indian generation didn’t quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you’ll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.
TIME responds: We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column “My Own Private India.” It was in no way intended to cause offense.
Joel Stein responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.
Toronto Life Article: The Tragic Life & Death Of Aqsa Parvez.
The discerning mediavore’s take on the news of the day, from city hall to Power Ball
Revisiting Aqsa Parvez: Q&A with Mary Rogan
The author of “Girl, Interrupted”—Toronto Life’s cover story about the life and death of Aqsa Parvez—discusses honour killings, Islamophobia and how the 16-year-old’s murderers got off easy.
In “Girl, Interrupted,” you describe the reaction on the Internet to Aqsa Parvez’s death. Has the debate about the crime, and what it says about multiculturalism, evolved since she died?
The debate is continuing, especially now that her father and brother have pleaded guilty. What happened, initially, was a typical teen response—very operatic, a lot of grief and drama. But what started to emerge were arguments. Some were highbrow, like on Salon, and others were outright brawls, especially on Facebook. What was interesting was the number of people, especially young Muslim men, who came forward to condemn Aqsa. I found it particularly disturbing. They said that she had brought shame to her family, that she’d been corrupted by Western values, that she was a slut. There were also a lot of people coming forward with a lot of hatred for Muslims. It degenerated pretty quickly.
How did you feel about the intense reaction to your story?
I was maybe a little naive going in. I got caught up in getting to know Aqsa and understanding her struggle. My goal was to humanize her—I wanted the reader to know her. When the criticism came out, especially the accusations of Islamophobia and cultural insensitivity, I was quite staggered. I expected I might get direct criticism from the Muslim community but didn’t. Instead, it came from Toronto feminist groups. There were protests, there were on-line debates and ugly postings saying that the conclusions I had drawn, even if they weren’t wrong, were racist, and this story was another example of the growing persecution of Muslims in North America. I was very shocked by the idea that feminists would be aligning themselves with conservative Muslims. I certainly see it now all the time.
Do you regret using the term “honour killing”?
No, not at all. I think the story’s critics make a wilful and profoundly irrational attempt to distinguish the crime from its context. Let me explain it this way: if someone is walking down the street and killed in the course of a crime, that’s a terrible thing. But if three guys in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag stop a black man, drive him into the woods and hang him, we know something very different has happened, and we have a word for that. Lynching means something very specific. Similarly, a hate crime is a very specific charge. It surprised me that people were so afraid to describe Aqsa’s death as an honour killing. It’s irrational to think that we can’t call something what it is because that community can’t sustain that kind of criticism. Ultimately, I think that’s very infantilizing. If the Muslim community can’t sustain the kind of criticism that other communities go through, then there’s no hope for moving forward.
To research this story, you immersed yourself in a youth culture that was new to you. Would you explain your process and how you found Aqsa’s friends and got them to talk to you?
It was my son, who is about the same age as Aqsa’s friends, who told me I’d never get in touch with them unless I joined Facebook. I did, and when I approached Aqsa’s friends, they immediately agreed to be interviewed. I spent a lot of time with Ebonie Mitchell and Ashley Garbut, who were best friends with Aqsa. They were friends, but they lived in very different worlds. While the Parvezes had a large house in a nice suburb, these two girls had a very limited income. They didn’t have money for a phone card and were in their own ways living on the edge.
What was the reaction when you approached the staff for an interview at Aqsa’s school, Applewood Heights?
They were defensive. The school staff is preoccupied with cultural sensitivity, even though Aqsa went to them and said, “My culture is killing me. My father is insisting I wear the hijab and not see my friends.” The school’s response was to contact Aqsa’s imam, which seemed insane to me. It was like bringing in a Christian brother to speak to an altar boy who complained of abuse by a priest. She was very clear about what the problem was, but the school staff is trained to reach out to leaders in the community. And in the Muslim community, in Aqsa’s part of the world, the community leaders are imams. It was a crazy bind that she found herself in.
Did you find that experts were also reluctant to talk about the case?
When I interviewed the family’s imam, and other Muslim leaders and academics, the universal reaction was that we can’t call this an honour killing because we don’t know if it’s an honour killing. There was a fair amount of resentment that the media was describing Aqsa’s death that way—that it was discriminatory, racist and Islamophobic. But, you know, if it looks like a chicken and clucks like a chicken, it probably is a chicken. And whether you want to bring a feminist analysis to it and talk about patriarchal power, Aqsa’s death had all the earmarks of an honour killing. Here was a girl who was trying to break out of her family’s demands and limited roles that they expected her to play. There was evidence from friends, and from what the school had admitted she told them about her family problems. So it wasn’t like I was taking it out of thin air.
Have you been in contact with Ebonie and Ashley since the story was published?
Yes, I did stay in touch with them. Ebonie has a kid now, and I know that she and Ashley participated in a documentary that’s being made about Aqsa. After the story came out, a lot of people found me on Facebook. I was asked to be friends by at least 100 Muslims who really appreciated the story and wanted to share their stories with me. They didn’t agree with the criticism of the story, and that was heartening.
Are you satisfied that the case against Aqsa’s father and brother has come to an end?
The other day, there was an editorial in the Globe questioning why the Crown accepted the second-degree murder plea and asking why there’s no appetite to pursue the tough cases. It’s clear the murder was planned, and I was disappointed that it ended up as second degree. When Aqsa’s brother gets out of jail, he’ll be a relatively young man, young enough to start a family. They could have pushed for first degree, and I think they would have won.
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