“We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we in agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.”
—Isaiah 28:15, KJV
March 21, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Recently, the Toronto Star—that purported clarion of journalistic objectivity that is in reality little more than a running endorsement of secular humanist causes—focused on the alleged plight of a woman described as “a Catholic, a mom and a lesbian,” a combination of terms that would have been not only socially unacceptable in any previous age but both a biological and theological impossibility. One may have been a lesbian but not in convergence with motherhood or faithful membership in the Roman Catholic Church.
But that really was another age. In this progressive era, this mother of two was shocked to discover that, despite the dictates of the Royal Dalton government, St. Joseph’s Catholic Elementary School in Bowmanville, Ont. had gravely erred in not sufficiently accommodating the gay agenda. The dreaded offense? A Catholic school had actually dared to espouse Catholic doctrine and, in the midst of a languid tract on equity and inclusion in the classroom, actually cited the Catholic catechism and suggested that homosexuals are “objectively disordered.” Can you imagine the temerity of a Catholic school teaching Catholic dogma in the classroom?
It must all be too much for Premier Dalton McGuinty, a smorgasbord Catholic who carefully picks and chooses his doctrinal preferences with a supreme fastidiousness that embraces the brotherhood of man but rejects the church’s courageous insistence that abortion is not a choice but an act of murder. Last December he briskly ordered all Ontario schools to get with the Gay-Straight Alliance Club program, allegedly with a view to ending forever the scourge of bullying in our schools and preparing the way for a happy humanist future.
If it has disturbed the premier’s sleep or interrupted his chronic political sleepwalking, the St. Joseph incident is surely only a bonafide crisis within the pages of the Star. But the story does highlight the idiocy and yes, tyranny, of an Ontario government that insists upon forcing Roman Catholic, Evangelical, and Jewish schools to adopt policies that are in direct contravention of their religious mandate. But is this alleged attempt at inclusion really designed to prevent bullying or is it about promoting something else? Does this policy actually address bullying or is it actually a “refuge of lies,” as Isaiah wrote?
Clearly, there is a profound need to address the issue of bullying in schools – in Ontario and across Canada. But forcing Christian schools to sanction, endorse or otherwise bless homosexual behaviour is not part of that solution; it only serves to deny freedom of religion in Canada and to affirm a gay agenda that seeks to redefine bullying as anything critical of homosexuality to the exclusion of all other forms of physical and verbal abuse. If you think this view extreme or insufficiently accommodating to a persecuted minority, just try to be a Christian student in the Canadian school system who, because of the convictions of one’s faith, quietly refuses to become a cheerleader for the proliferation of the gay-straight alliance network. You will be swiftly marginalized, censured, and yes, bullied.
So who is being bullied in this process? Who is being forced to amend their convictions, suspend their beliefs and discard their truths because the provincial government says so? The Toronto Star might rejoice that “Queen’s Park told school boards to create policies that foster ‘equity and inclusion,’” but there is little joy for those being forced to reconstitute 2000 years of faith history in order to appease the moral whims of our increasingly sybaritic society and the legislative quick-fix schemes of the nanny state.
When the government bullies the Church it violates our fundamental freedom of religion, something that many of us thought was protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights. If that liberty is not safe, then nothing else ultimately will be secure either.
David Krayden is the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, an independent, not-for-profit institution dedicated to the advancement of freedom and prosperity through the development and promotion of good public policy.