LifeSiteNews.com reports:
As Premier Dalton McGuinty presses forward with his controversial “anti-bullying” bill, he is invoking his Catholic faith to justify his effort to impose “gay” clubs on the province’s Catholic schools in violation of Catholic teaching. The premier has been emphatically using the homosexual activist preferred term “gay” (see video) and its current association with the broad homosexual sub-culture or lifestyle.
“I fully expect that Catholic kids are going to use the word ‘gay,”’ McGuinty told reporters earlier this month, after emphasizing that the anti-bullying bill requires schools to allow students to set up gay-straight alliances, though not necessarily under that name.
“I fully expect that Catholic teachers are going to use the word gay, and as a Catholic premier of Ontario I’m going to be talking about gay kids,” he added.
McGuinty’s “Accepting Schools Act”, which was tabled Nov. 30th and is undergoing second reading, seeks to impose tougher consequences, including expulsion, for “bullying and hate-motivated actions,” with a special emphasis on “sexual orientation”.
The Catholic Civil Rights League warns (my bolds):
The Catholic Civil Rights League supports efforts to make all schools welcoming and respectful of all students, and to provide guidance, support and pastoral care for individual students. Students have a right to be free from bullying in all of its forms. Moreover, that is what parents expect, whether they send their children to public or publicly funded Catholic schools. However, there is more at issue in what the Ontario Liberal government has proposed. While some effort is made to allow school boards to develop policies that discourage and penalize bullying, Bill 13 also includes significant effort to advance a radical understanding of gender, adopted from various queer studies movements, of which great numbers of Ontarians may be unaware. Bill 13 introduces in its preamble the acceptance of the disputed notion of "gender" as a social construct, making use of the acronym LGBTTIQ to describe variants of sexual orientation (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, two-spirited, intersexed, queer and questioning). Is there a need to engage in the broad acceptance of controversial studies in these areas to provide schools and school boards with tools to address bullying? Is it necessary to identify and label various students according to notions of their "gender" in order to hold bullies to account? A comprehensive anti-bullying policy based on respect for the dignity of the person, which is consistent with Catholic teaching, would recognize that all students should be free from bullying, without categorization or qualification.
The government has gone further, and has deemed that school boards “shall support pupils who want to establish and lead…activities or organizations that promote the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, including organizations with the name gay-straight alliance or another name.” Why are parents, trustees, or school officials to be shut out from oversight of such clubs?
Parents of all faiths, including those with a blind faith in government edicts, will wish to know just what is being offered at their local school, especially in the areas of sex and gender, with or without the engagement of faith and morals.
In particular, a student led club for various strands of the now-identified LGBTTIQ theory of gender cannot be adopted in a Catholic setting, since all sexual activities outside of the traditional understanding of marriage are understood to be sinful, and in contravention of Church teaching. Forcing a student-led club on these themes on Catholic boards, in a manner implying approval of the subject matter, would be an affront to Church teaching, and a subversion or infringement upon the denominational guarantees established in the constitution with respect to Catholic schools in Ontario.It is also a dramatic infringement on the prior rights of parents to educate their children.
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