Toronto School Board Member Sam Sotiropoulos Joins The Train Wreck Interview Hall Of Fame

What if you took one part Labour Party leader and hapless talking point repeater Edward Miliband ...

... and added one part Australia Prime Minister and angry dimwit Tony Abbott?

Well, then you'd get Toronto School Board member and smug homophobe Sam Sotiropoulos, who during an interview with the Global News to discuss some of his disturbing tweets about the Toronto LGBT community, suffered a multi-car derailment of his cognitive choo-choo. ThinkProgress' Zack Ford sets the scene:

Since 2012, Toronto schools have followed a policy of inclusion for transgender students, recognizing their gender identities without requiring them to somehow prove or justify them. Two weeks ago, Sotiropoulos tweeted, “Until I see scientific proof that transgenderism exists and is not simply a mental illness, I reserve the right not to believe in it. #TDSB” TDSB stands for Toronto District School Board and Sotiropoulos identifies himself on Twitter as @TrusteeSam, referring to his title with the district.

[...]

Sotiropoulos agreed to discuss his tweet with Global News, but then refused to actually provide his own views on transgender people. Indeed, as he similarly attempted to explain in a separate radio interview, what he meant is that he simply “reserved the right” to make a decision about whether being transgender is a mental illness, but that he hadn’t yet made such a decision. He seemed to deny the implication that in the mean time, he does believe that it is a mental illness. But when the reporter then brought up other anti-LGBT tweets he has posted in the past, he became truly flummoxed.

Here's Sotiropoulos, in all his smarmy glory:

Oh, Canada.

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