TORONTO, April 13, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA) has ordered its 45,600 teachers to pay $60.00 per head to help the Ontario Liberals with the upcoming October provincial election. This is in addition to the regular fee of $1,000 they charge their members each year.
Over the last few decades OECTA has made a sorry spectacle of itself. In the 1980s and 1990s this supposedly Catholic union became driven by Church dissenters. It came to believe that soon teachers would replace the (diminishing number of) priests in the Church and take over their role. So they began to dictate internal Church policies at their annual meetings such as demanding female priests and changes in Church moral teaching.
When the Church refused to listen, they embraced the larger pro-abortion unions and swallowed secularist thinking and politically correct cowardice. They became supporters of the immoral legislation passed in the sixties and seventies by federal and provincial governments. Today they support Premier Dalton McGuinty’s drive to indoctrinate the young in the schools with his “Equity and Inclusive Education.” This policy promotes the embrace of the homosexual lifestyle as normal, rational and acceptable.
James Ryan, OECTA’s president wrote a March 23rd letter to union members. He said delegates left the annual general meeting “acutely aware of how the election of a Conservative government under Tim Hudak would threaten the common good, particularly education.”
Catholics have been given a strong directive not to vote for politicians such as McGuinty who openly support abortion and other grave immoralities. God only knows how James Ryan managed to convolute the true meaning in the phrase ‘common good’ to imply that one may ignore God, Church and personal integrity.
Teachers should tell Jim Ryan to take a hike. If thousands refuse to pay, the plan will falter. If, in addition, hundreds get together, get organized, demand an end to this extortion, they might even hire a feisty lawyer and take these miscreants to Court. Yes, we know. In the past Courts have sided with the unions. But that was in the case of isolated individuals
This article is from the May 2011 edition of Catholic Insight magazine and is republished with permission.