JEWISH AND ANGLICAN SCHOLARS DEFEND CATHOLIC SCHOOL PRO-FAMILY STAND

* Every religious community assaulted by decision forcing Catholic Board to allow homosexual date at prom * Separate schools forced to “bow down and worship the great god Equality”  TORONTO, June 11, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Jewish and Anglican scholars have taken up the fight of the Catholic church regarding the Oshawa court ruling that Catholic high school student Marc Hall must be allowed to attend the school prom with his homosexual ‘boyfriend’.  Jewish philosophy professor David Novak, of the University of Toronto addressed the issue at a recent religious freedom conference as did Anglican law professor Ian Hunter of the University of Western Ontario in a recent issue of Report newsmagazine.  Referring to the Oshawa court decision Novak said: “The legal assault on the Catholic school board [in Ontario] is an assault on the integrity of every religious community in Canada. It should not be left to the final decision of any particular human court.” The Durham Catholic school board, he said “has as much right to determine who may attend its social activities and how he or she may attend them as it has the right to teach Catholic theology in its religion classes as authoritative teaching, . . . Every activity of a Catholic school should be recognizably Catholic, just as every activity of a Jewish school should be recognizably Jewish.” (Vancouver Sun, Friday June 7, 2002, Douglas Todd)  Hunter continued, “When future historians chronicle the demise of Roman Catholic education in Ontario, the chief agent of its destruction will turn out to be a 17-year-old Oshawa boy with spiked blue hair named Marc Hall.”  Regarding the court case and the situation of the Catholicism in Canada Hunter writes: “Not only is the judging biased. Catholic school boards must also contend even with their nominal allies: priests who equivocate or say nothing on moral issues; and politicians (like Allan Rock, nominally Catholic) who sell out the church’s teaching every chance they get.”  Catholic separate schools, he said, “sometimes by judicial fiat but often by choice, abandon any claim to a distinctively Catholic approach to education, an unabashedly doctrinal approach that was the raison d’être for their creation.”  In a stark wake up call to Canadian Christians Hunter says:  “Separate schools were created to ‘indoctrinate and inculcate’ the precepts of Catholic education. This judgment, if it is upheld, renders that impossible. Henceforth separate schools, like public schools, will bow down and worship the great god Equality; any deviations from the orthodoxy of human rights will be checked by court challenge.”  See Hunter’s column in Report newsmagazine:  https://report.ca/archive/report/20020610/p16i020610f.html