I’m puzzled as to what is so romantic about Tim Hortons that anyone would want to make out there. Is it the stark lighting and the plasticky tables and chairs? Maybe the scent of fresh doughnuts and hot coffee sets the endorphins percolating in some people’s brains. To each his (or her) own, I suppose.

The story this week about the gay couple who were thrown out of a Tim Hortons in Blenheim, Ont., makes me think Pierre Berton may have been wrong when he said that a Canadian is someone who can make love in a canoe. A Canadian might actually be someone who can make out at Tim Hortons.

Riley Duckworth, 25, and her partner, Patricia Pattenden, 23, say they were innocently enjoying a cup of coffee with family when Pattenden gave Duckworth a bit of an embrace and a chaste peck on the cheek. Rev. Eric Revie, a Pentecostal minister in Blenheim, was in the Timmy’s just then with his own kids and a youth group, and said that the two were “straddling each other” on a bench outside, hands in each other’s pants and tongues in each other’s throats, pretty much. He also said he didn’t know this was a same-sex couple; he thought it was a guy and a girl. Indeed, Duckworth says she’s androgynous – which means Revie could very well have mistaken her for a boy.

He asked the manager to get the couple to “tone it down,” because if his kids had “turned around, they would have seen this nearly pornographic image.” The manager asked the two women to leave because their behaviour “was making other guests feel uncomfortable.” Despite a later apology from the Timmy’s – unnecessary, if you ask me – there are now rumblings about filing complaints with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

I can’t imagine what “right” was violated in this case. The right to go at it in public? What section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms can that one be found in?

While I wasn’t there, thankfully, and in fact, tend to think of the more famous locale in Germany, rather than Ontario, whenever I hear of Blenheim, I believe Revie’s version of events. One reason is that a gay man from Blenheim and a transgender woman from Kitchener have spoken up on his behalf – the latter, Mary Van Speybroeck, after first backing the couple in their complaint. Then, she talked to the pastor.

“For me, the credibility is gone,” Van Speybroeck said. “As a member of the LGBTQ community, I’d like equal rights as much as anyone, but not at the expense of honesty.” And Ty Williams, the Blenheim man, says Revie’s church “is not homophobic and this reverend is getting threats, his kids are scared to be at their house. It is slander what this group is doing.” Williams says the whole thing is being “blown way out of proportion.”

Good for these two for not jumping on the bandwagon with the folks who are feverishly composing the human rights complaint as we speak. I mean, let’s get real. Who in his right mind goes into Tim Hortons – with children in tow, to boot – and deliberately brings this type of misery down on himself? It makes no sense. Revie was there for a doughnut and coffee, not to hunt down a gay couple and harass them. Had the couple actually been heterosexual, Revie would have complained, the story would never have made headlines, and the words “human rights commission” would never have been uttered.