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ST. CATHARINES, Ontario, May 7, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The parents revolt to stop Ontario’s new sex education curriculum is raising up articulate spokespeople who are both exposing the plan’s flaws and avoiding the government’s and media’s efforts to “frame” them as homophobic, religion-bound ignoramuses.
Late last week Feras Marish, an Oakville project manager, used his extensive interview with CKTB St. Catharines radio host Larry Fedoruk to present the parents’ arguments clearly while knocking down the government’s.
Fresh from the meeting between protest leaders and Premier Kathleen Wynne, Marish at first presented the parents as aggressive but as the interview unfolded he—and they—came across as informed and reasonable.
The parents, he told Fedoruk, went into the meetings with “demands” for “the complete withdrawal” of the new sex-ed curriculum, telling the premier, “We really want to go back to the drawing board; we really want to go back to proper consultation.”
But Premier Wynne only wanted to placate the parents, not address their concerns by delaying the curriculum’s implementation, Marish told CKTB listeners. Instead, she advised them “to get your children out of class” whenever an objectionable lesson came up.
But “children are actually being harrassed and humiliated” by classmates when they leave class, the parents complained. “OK,” responded Wynne, “leave them in class.” Commented Marish to the radio audience, “This is becoming a joke, here.”
Expanding on the theme of the need for consultation, Marish told Fedoruk that schools don’t dare serve a “slice of pizza” to students “without parents having to sign on it,” yet here was the education system “enforcing on the parents certain ideas and certain values without ever having asked them about it.”
But the problem went far beyond the Wynne government’s arrogance to the curriculum’s content. Here, Marish later told LifeSiteNews, he knew he had to be careful, since fellow protesters had been “trapped” by news media into being characterized as homophobes. “Once they get there they can’t escape.”
Marish avoided the trap by taking the initiative. When challenged by Fedoruk that there was nothing truly objectionable in the curriculum—just facts, Marish responded with two examples from the primary school curriculum: the academic theory of gender identity and gender fluidity, which holds that a person’s gender is self-determined, and masturbation.
Marish dismissed the first subject simply, with, “I’m not sending my kids to school to be told, you know, ‘You are a boy but you could be a girl,’” but got more heated on the second topic. He first cited the prescribed teacher’s response when a child questions the normalcy of masturbation: “Exploring one’s body by touching or masturbating is something that many people do and find pleasurable. It is common and is not harmful.” He then told his audience, “It seems like an invitation.”
This prompted Fedoruk to ask if the protesters’ motivations were religious. “It doesn’t matter what religion you come from,” said Marish. “I don’t want anyone telling my children that masturbation is pleasurable and maybe you should try it.”
Fedoruk raised the argument of curriculum proponents that kids need “accurate information” from schools because the Internet and social media expose them to all sorts of objectionable things. But Marish rebutted: “There is no such thing as masturbating properly. There is no such a thing as to do something wrong properly.”
He went on, “The premier said that 20 percent of our children engage in sex at an early age. So what is the solution to that? Get the other 80 percent engaged?”
Marish later told LifeSiteNews he was aware that “our opponents want to use our religious differences to divide us. But these are minor differences. We have major concerns in common.” He added that the protesting parents needed to stay active and stay vigilant. “Even if the government does back down, they won’t give up. I have zero trust in the school system after this.”
Find a full listing of LifeSiteNews' coverage of the Ontario government's explicit sex-ed program here.
