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(LifeSiteNews) — Like Heather Mallick, Martin Regg Cohn is one of those Toronto Star columnists who displays, in addition to an airtight skull, a dazzling combination of arrogance and ignorance. A few years back, he penned a screed in which he claimed that Canadian doctors who declined to participate in practices that violate their consciences were “doing the work of the devil” and suggested that those who revealed their Christian beliefs should be kept out of medical school and instead sent to divinity school. Cohn, as it turns out, has not read much on the social consequences of requiring medical professionals to violate their consciences. That he does not understand the concept of conscience is both obvious and unsurprising.  

Cohn, unsurprisingly, is at it again — and this time his column in a not-so-veiled threat aimed at Catholic schools for their refusal to publicly signal their support for his ideology: “York’s Catholic school trustees are abusing their power by refusing to raise the Pride flag. Their day of reckoning is coming.” He begins — and you cannot make this stuff up — with a Bible text: “Pride comes before a fall.” Which is indisputably true, but an odd verse to use as the lede to your column defending “Pride Month.” In his column, Cohn decries “prejudice toward the Pride flag” (a new category of sin, apparently, is bigotry toward the banners of ideologies you do not happen to share) while displaying a healthy amount of bigotry toward Canadians who disagree with him on said flag.

The writing is nearly as bad as the argumentation, but it is worth breaking down: 

By refusing to raise the Pride flag at their main office, Catholic school trustees in York Region are giving Ontario a lesson in the politics of religious intolerance and intransigence. When blind faith closes its eyes to LGBTQ students, it leads to a dead end.

“The flag does not align with our faith,” argued board chair Frank Alexander. “We stand for our faith, we stand for Christ.”

Not so simple. It is not merely a matter of personal faith, for it also matters how the public feels.

York’s Catholic trustees are caught up in a catechism wrapped in a contradiction inside an anachronism. The trouble with their regressive and aggressive stand is not just that it harms LGBTQ students, but that it hurts the good name of Catholic educators everywhere ― the vast majority of whom are broadly supportive of Pride flags and GSAs.

Apparently to Cohn — and one can almost imagine him chuckling to himself as he wrote his “catechism” line — Catholic trustees remaining consistent with the two-millennia-old teachings of their church need to ignore the “matter of personal faith” based on “how the public feels.” He also asserts, completely without evidence, that declining to fly a flag over an office building “harms LGBTQ students,” which it most certainly does not. This decision, says Cohn, was made by “rogue Catholic trustees” when in fact the opposite is true — when Catholic trustees decide to make decisions completely contrary to the Catholic faith, one could call that “rogue.” But don’t let facts stand in the way — Cohn claims that now “Catholics are essentially in a majority,” which is completely false by any measurable metric. 

Cohn noted that, in his view, the time has come to defund Ontario’s Catholic schools and merge them with other school boards to ensure that everyone is herded into line. The fact that not every single school celebrates his worldview (while he regularly trashes the worldviews of others) is, to Cohn, unacceptable. He notes that Education Minister Stephen Lecce, a member of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government (lol), is on his side, sending a memo to all school boards ordering that “all students — most especially 2sLGBTQ+ students — feel supported, reflected in their schools … That includes celebrating Pride.” Or else, adds Cohn. The way to “prevail” over Catholic educators, he writes, “is to remind them … that the constitutional is merely political and temporal.” Cohn suggests that the argument for defunding Catholic schools is a simple one: 

The argument should not be about saving souls versus saving dollars, because reducing duplication is not the way to win hearts and minds. The more compelling case is that Ontario must truly reflect the diversity of its religiosity, by enacting true unity in our schools — educating and integrating people of all persuasions and faiths in a single public system (with other believers free to fund their own systems by opting out).

Goodwill has gotten Ontario a long way, but over time we must find the political will to merge and modernize our education system. Without a new framework, with clear rules and rights, our students will remain pawns in recurring political conflicts under the guise of traditional religious schisms.

The version of diversity promoted by folks like Cohn is genuinely amusing. Diversity is important — so long as we all genuflect to the same ideological flag representing the same values he himself holds, because he says so. It is not bigoted to claim that an entire religious group holds the wrong values (values held by many other religious groups in Canada, including the Muslim community, the Sikh community, the Hindu community, and the Orthodox Jewish community, for starters) — but it is bigoted if you don’t publicly declare your support for Cohn’s preferred cause and political agenda.  

Pride does, indeed, come before a fall.  

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.

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