MONTREAL, November 21, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Commission scolaire de Montréal (CSDM) is revising its school forms to comply with request by a homosexual advocacy group that said the terms “mother” and “father” no longer reflect the family structure of students in their schools.
The CSDM received the request from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-identified (LGBT) Family Coalition. Its director, Mona Greenbaum, told the Montreal Gazette that the change is not just for same-sex parents but for single-parent and “blended” families.
“There are all kinds of families in Quebec,” Greenbaum said. “The forms have to reflect what type of families are in the school board.”
School Commissioner Agnès Connat said the change was brought about in reaction to complaints from same-sex couples, such as two male parents who protested that the existing forms were discriminatory.
“Every time they filled out a form, they had to cross out ‘mother’ and write ‘father,’ ” said Commissioner Connat. “They said they didn’t think it reflected the diversity of families.”
The CSDM has followed the lead of the English Montreal School Board, which substituted “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” for mother and father in its forms last year.
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Critics of the homosexual movement to impose a gender neutral description of a child's parents say it is not a harmless defense of “equality” or a reaction to “discrimination,” but the beginning of a complete, and detrimental, reorganization of society.
Addressing similar proposals to remove mother and father from official documents in Italy, the Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, Carlo Caffarra, said changing the categories of family life and genealogy could send “a real earthquake” through social structure.
Speaking at a conference at the Teatro Manzoni in Bologna in September, Cardinal Caffarra said that the main focus for educators should be understanding the primacy of marriage between man and woman, which has as its foundation the “intrinsic ability to give rise to a new the human person.”
He called fatherhood or motherhood the “highest capacity and responsibility that men and women have,” because it is “one of the points where the creative action of God enters our created universe.”
Cardinal Caffarra warned the teachers in the audience, “The witnesses of the truth of conjugal life will be difficult, as not infrequently happens to the witnesses of the truth. But this is the most urgent task of the educator.”
While school boards are succumbing to the demands of the homosexual movement, research into the educational outcomes of children in same-sex households is raising awareness that these children are at a substantial disadvantage compared to children in traditional married mother and father households.
A new academic study based on the Canadian census reveals that the children of homosexual and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples.
The study was conducted by Douglas W. Allen, professor of economics at British Columbia's Simon Fraser University.
Allen noted that while almost all previous studies of same-sex parenting have concluded there is “no difference” in a range of outcome measures for children who live in a household with same-sex parents compared to children living with married opposite-sex parents, his analysis of a large random sample taken from the 2006 Canada census suggests otherwise.
“The particular gender mix of a same-sex household has a dramatic difference in the association with child graduation,” Allen wrote. “Consider the case of girls…Regardless of the controls and whether or not girls are currently living in a gay or lesbian household, the odds of graduating from high school are considerably lower than any other household type. Indeed, girls living in gay households are only 15 percent as likely to graduate compared to girls from opposite sex married homes.”
In his conclusions to the study, Allen stated that “children of married opposite-sex families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.”
Writing in Public Discourse, researcher and sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin Mark Regnerus – whose own research found that children of heterosexual parents fared better on numerous indicators of personal well-being than children of homosexual parents – said of Allen's research, “What is surprising in the Canadian data is the revelation that lesbian couples’ children fared worse, on average, than even those of single parents.”
Regnerus concluded, “The intact, married mother-and-father household remains the gold standard for children’s progress through school.”
Contact:
Montreal School Board
3737 Sherbrooke Street East
Montreal (Quebec) H1X 3B3
Phone: 514 596-6000
E-mail: [email protected]
Names and contact information for members of the Board of Commissioners of the Montreal School Board are available here.