Angry in the Great White North

From LifeSite, a Catholic news publication:

A British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal is preparing to hear what pro-family and religious groups are calling a truly frightening case. Murray and Peter Corren, a B.C. gay couple, filed a complaint against the B.C. Ministry of education in 1999 alleging that the Ministry’s curriculum didn’t adequately “address issues of sexual orientation.” That case is slated to be heard beginning today.

“Basically, there is systemic discrimination through omission and suppression of queer issues in the whole of the curriculum,” alleges Murray Corren, who is an elementary school teacher in Port Coquitlam.

What many are finding deeply disturbing, however, is that the Corren’s are not only seeking inclusion of explicitly homosexual material in the curriculum, promoting homosexuality as a normative and safe lifestyle option, but also that they wish to ensure that the material is mandatory.

Got that? Mandatory. Currently, the issue of homosexuality is classified as "sensitive", requiring that parents be informed that the issue will be raised in class, and giving the ample time to withdraw their child if they so choose.

I mean, parents have a right to have the final say over the education of their children, right? The State has already made reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as basic science, mandatory, which also undermines parental rights. But the accepted wisdom was that these skills are so important that parents could not be trusted to have the wisdom to ensure that their children were taught these skills. I can almost buy that, though I wonder just how many children we actually get yanked from math class if parents were given the right to do so.

I dare say most parents are annoyed that their children are not receiving enough education, especially in the basics.

But now sexual orientation is going to join geography as a non-sensitive issue, and thus the education of which will be outside of the control of parents to manage:

The gay couple’s legal council, Tim Timberg, said, “The second issue is there’s an opting-out provision in the curriculum that where a subject is deemed to be sensitive, the school teachers are under an obligation to in advance advise parents that they’ll be raising a sensitive issue in the classroom.” The Human Rights Complaint seeks to remove sexual orientation from the list of ‘sensitive’ issues.

I need to read and write to hold a job, make money, and pay taxes. Since when does my attitude about queer issues matter?

The evolution of the classroom from a means to efficiently impart the basic mental toolset needed by all functional members of society into the conduit for mass social engineering by the secular progressive humanists is almost complete, at least in British Columbia.

Interestingly, if sexual orientation is made a non-sensitive mandatory subject, what of home schooled children? Home schooled children are still required to write exams set by the province to ensure that their education is adequate. Will they be tested on the breadth and depth of knowledge of queer issues?

What if they fail?

Will parents be held responsible for not teaching queer issues? How will they be punished if they refuse to comply? Will we be presented with the spectacle of home schooled children being removed from homes and forced to go into school because their queer issues training is deficient or wrong, by the standards set by the queer community?

Not a pleasant thought.

And for all those who said Bill C-38 won't have such much of an affect on society at large, so don't worry about it:

Recent legal and political developments mean that curriculum in this province is out of date and needs to be revised.

"Now that same-sex marriage has been a reality in British Columbia for over two years and the House of Commons has recently passed legislation to legalize lesbian and gay marriages, the landscape has changed radically since we first filed this complaint", said Murray Corrren. "Same-sex marriage is legal in this province, children from those families attend our schools, and the public education system is going to have to deal with this fact. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Education is out of touch with that reality and feels little urgency to have the curriculum reflective of these changes."

Sounds like Bill C-38 is being used as a wedge with which to force open the door on other non-marriage issues, like the promoting of a queer agenda in the school system. Gee, who would have thought that could happen?

You don't think other special interest groups might try to do the same thing, do you?

[Similar priorities seem to be on the mind of American educators as well (here and here)]