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Kathleen Wynne (blue dress) and partner at Gay Pride paradeOntario Premier's Office

Urgent: Sign a petition to stop Ontario's sex-ed curriculum here. 

TORONTO, March 11, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — As Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne touts her role as a mother to show she is qualified to update the province’s sex-ed curriculum, information has surfaced about how she left her 13-year marriage and wreaked havoc in the lives of her three young children as she took up her homosexual relationship with her current partner, Jane Rounthwaite.

In the 2007 book Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End. Families Don't, which aims to recast what it means to be “family” after a failed marriage, author Cate Cochran unwittingly reveals alarming details of just how dysfunctional Wynne’s family became in her “New Age” quest for “sexual energy.”

In a chapter on Wynne’s family, the book describes Kathleen Wynne and Phil Cowperthwaite as “university sweethearts” who lived together for a couple of years after graduating. The author states that when they were “ready to have children” they decided to get married. This happened in 1977.

The couple had three children, Christopher, Jessie, and Maggie. According to the author, Wynne “loved being a mother.” 

“She remembers waking up when the kids were young with a sense of well-being that she was following all the rules for the first time in her life and reaping lots of approval — baking muffins, taking part in the neighborhood garage sale, attending the kids’ school council meetings, and thinking to herself, “I’m doing this quite well. Oh my God, how did this happen? I didn’t expect to be living this perfect life.”

Wynne finds her ‘wild woman’ during sexual encounter with Jane

Cochran explains that Kathleen and Phil began to drift apart after embracing “Eighties-style ‘New Age’ ideas” and reading “stacks of self-improvement books.” 

“They had beautiful kids, and affluence but the sexual energy had become muted, and Kathleen knew ‘there had been a wild woman in me that hadn't been around for a while,’” states the author, quoting Wynne.

It was during a “group therapy” organized by Wynne that she realized she had “feelings” for a woman in the group who had a crush on her. It was during a weekend getaway with her best friend Jane Rounthwaite to examine a cottage the family wanted to purchase that Wynne began a homosexual affair, breaking her marriage vow to Phil. 

“I know this isn’t a story about how I came out as a lesbian, but it was finding my sexual energy that led me to break with Phil,” Wynne told the author. 

Rounthwaite admitted she had been keeping an eye on Wynne for 18 years ever since the two had met when Wynne was 20 and Rounthwaite was 21. 

“I waited 18 years for her,” Rounthwaite told Toronto Star in a June 2014 article. “Basically, from the time I met Kath in 1973, I was just waiting — through her marriage, through my (own) relationship (with a woman) — I just waited all those years.” 

Children’s lives ‘turned inside out’ but had to live ‘myth’ of happy family

After the weekend at the cottage, Rounthwaite moved in with Wynne, while her husband moved down to the basement. To the adults this “made sense,” the author writes, but to the three little children “whose lives were being turned inside out, it didn’t.” 

The children were confused by the new arrangement and quickly became miserable.

“Jessie, who was nine, and Christopher, who was eleven, were livid…Maggie, who was just six…remembers feeling sad.” 

“They were not happy. The world as they knew it changed forever, and it happened quickly. Almost in the same breath, the children learned that their parents were splitting up and that their mother had a new partner — a woman,” the author writes.

The transition especially affected the eldest, Christopher. 

“He felt he’d been dragged into his parents’ experiment and expressed his anger and frustration with great drama. He saw Jane as the interloper,” the author writes. Once while on a ski trip Christopher “plaintively asked if he could have his old family back.” 

Click here to sign a petition urging the Wynne government to drop its sex ed program.

“He wanted the experiment to be over and to return to the way things were. It fell to Kathleen to disabuse him of that idea,” the author writes.

In the midst of the family experiment, Christopher began “questioning his own sexuality,” eventually declaring he was ‘gay’ when he went to university. Christopher now sees that his parents’ experiment made him insecure in his own sexuality. He hated telling people about his family and despised his dad for not being a “strong man.”

“To expose how our family was different also made me think about how I was different from my friends,” he said. 

The children were embarrassed to have Rounthwaite in the house, telling visiting friends that she was the “cleaning lady.” 

There was fighting among the adults. At one point Wynne and Rounthwaite hid in the closet with the door closed until Cowperthwaite’s anger cooled down. It was after one “enormous fight” that Cowperthwaite decided to move out of the house.

While the grown children believe the adults were “doing their best” in a difficult situation, they told the author they now take their mother to task for “indulging in a kind of myth-making” in her attempt to whitewash the dismal reality of the home situation. Maggie, the youngest, told the author how she struggled with her mother’s “need to look for the positive” during that time while ignoring the reality of what the children actually suffered.

“[In our family] you can have your confrontations, you can fight, but you can’t say ‘I’m really sad that you and Dad got divorced.’ There’s so much guilt that [we] adults have… [and we have] to live that myth, so the adults [my two moms and dad] can feel it’s okay,” she said.

Maggie now calls it “really hard” to have grown up in such a dysfunctional family. She says it’s “terrifying” trying to figure out what is normal, but to this day she has “never felt comfortable” when shown what is considered “conventional.”

“I’ve tried it on, but it just doesn’t work,” she said.

Wynne feared new woman getting between her and her children 

When Cowperthwaite met another woman named Sue and brought her into the family to be with the children, Wynne immediately felt “threatened.” She feared her husband and his new lover would take the children. She quickly made it clear to Sue that nobody was getting between her and her children. 

Rounthwaite explains it this way: “Sue was now in the privileged position as the partner of this wealthy heterosexual man in a much more socially acceptable family unit. She had what Kathleen had given up, really, and the only thing Kath had left of that was the kids. And if Sue and Phil really had wanted, they probably could have gotten the kids, too. That was the fear.” 

A new generation of kids

Now thousands of parents in Ontario fear that Wynne’s push for even more explicit discussions of sexuality in the province’s classrooms could do lasting damage in their own families.

Critics argue that the proposed curriculum contains too much explicit information too early and contains a clear agenda to promote “gender identity” ideology and other socially liberal sexual values. In the curriculum children learn from the earliest ages about “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” and accepting “diversity.” They also learn that anal and oral homosexual practices are biologically and morally equivalent to vaginal sex.

Not once in the entire curriculum do the words love, marriage, or responsibility appear in relation to sex. 

Over 100,000 citizens have signed petitions by organizations such as LifeSiteNews, Parents as First Educators, Ezra Levant’s Protect Our Kids, Campaign Life Coalition, and the Institute for Canadian Values, all urging the government to back off the new program. 

Thousands of parents are also banding together on social media sites such as Facebook to stop the curriculum from coming into their children’s schools. There are plans for a protest at Queens Park on April 14, a week-long parent & student school-strike in May, and a potential lawsuit to stop the implementation of the sex-ed. 

Find a full list of LifeSiteNews' coverage of the Wynne government's explicit sex ed program here.